I'm feeling expansive today, might as well extend the previous post.
If as a new brewer you decide you want to improve your processes, there are other ways to control ferm temps that involve more equipment and money than a simple swamp cooler (which, btw, usually works just fine). I remember as a new brewer asking myself how much money I wanted to commit to all this, so until I was sure I wanted to continue, a swamp cooler was it.
I'm the kind of guy who wants to improve processes--faster, better, more efficient, higher quality--so I began to look at other ways to control ferm temps.
The standard way is to use a refrigerator, a heat belt, and a temp controller to control fermentation temp. I lucked out in that I got a cheap refrigerator as part of some equipment a guy was selling. You can of course get them free, on craigslist, and so on.
The guy had an Inkbird controller so I didn't have to buy one;
they're $35 on Amazon. I now have 5 of them.
All I needed was a heat belt. You can get them from
about $13 to
about $26. The heat belt warms up the fermenter when the time comes, and helps maintain ferm temps within a degree or so.
You set the refrigerator to where it will run all the time, plug that and the heat belt into the Inkbird, and attach the temp probe to the fermenter (I use a piece of foam to hold it against the side of the fermenter along w/ a bungee cord). When the fermenter gets warmer than your set point, the Inkbird turns on the refrigerator to cool. When it's too cool, the Inkbird turns on the heat mat to warm it.
You can also do this with a tall dorm-style refrigerator which is much more space-friendly. They have a small freezer compartment which some people bend down and out of the way; I never was comfortable trying that--kink a line and the refigerator is toast--so I used a stopper and piece of tubing instead of an airlock and ran the line out of the refrigerator to a blowoff jar.
You can also, if you have a lot of money to burn, look to glycol chillers. These are fairly common for those with stainless fermenters and temp control coils. It's possible to DIY a glycol chiller and there are several threads on HBT about that--I've done it myself, but also bought a dedicated Penguin glycol chiller. These DIY ones use anything from a window air conditioner to a dorm-style refrigerator to the freezer compartment on a larger refrigerator. Since a dedicated glycol chiller runs from about $700-1000, you can see why people would DIY it.
Here are a few pics showing these various options:
