Jonson Controls A19AAT-2C Freezer Temperature Controller (D132)

This item is just the ticket to convert a chest freezer into a chest refrigerator. Country folk know its smart to keep a backup freezer, there's a lot of valuable food in the primary one and if it goes down the lost food can easily exceed the value of the freezer. That empty freezer can come in real handy at times, especially if one can accurately control its temperature. Too much garden produce to fit in the refrigerator and you can't process it for several days, or want to accumulate more before spending a day processing the produce? No problem, just set the temperature you desire and you have the equivalent of a second refrigerator. The most common reason people give for not liking wild game is that it tastes "gamey". Ever eat freshly slaughtered beef? It tastes gamey too. The primary cause of a gamey taste is failure to age the meat. Even the cheapest beef is aged a few days before its hits the supermarket. The bovine served at expensive steak houses is frequently aged about a month. That's why its so good and so expensive. Aging naturally tenderizes and improves the flavor of any meat. Most people can't tell the difference between properly aged venison and supermarket beef. This temperature control unit is easy to use and allows you to maintain the proper temperature within a precise range to age your own meat or keep garden produce for extended periods. Add a pan of water to maintain a high humidity and you've virtually duplicated the conditions in a commercial aging room. Have a fruit tree but not enough room in your refrigerator to store several bushels of fruit while you process it for long term storage? Problem solved! Use your imagination, any process that requires a constant temperature below normal room temperature is solved by this unit.

Excellent quality and really holds to the temp I have at once I dialed it in. Love my new fridge that is a freezer running as a fridge using the controller. Mechanical rather than digital is much better and reliable.

I bought 2 of these to turn some Frigidaire (FGCH25M8LW) chest freezers into refrigerators. It looked simple enough and I could not find any real evidence to suggest that this thermostat shutting off the power to the compressor was going to harm the life span of the freezer.The one thing that I didn't do correctly (that in hindsight was fairly obvious) was that initially I left the gas filled sensor inside the freezer and ran the remaining 6 feet of copper tubing outside the freezer to the controller. I realized that was probably dumb as it would leave a significant surface area exposed to the outside temp that could skew the thermostat settings. OK, simple enough to fix. I just coiled the copper tubing back up, secured it to the inside of the freezer and mounted the controller to the outside leaving only a few inches of exposed copper which I insulated. Overkill? Maybe, but for that absurdly difficult change it's no longer a problem to with which to concern myself.So if you are looking at one of these to make a freezer into a fridge, it was simple and so far (2 months as of this review) it's worked without any fiddling needed. I'm happy. Unrelated to the actual product but related to its use. I have had a freezer and "converted" fridge running though Kill-a-Watt meters for about a month. The Frigidaire freezer takes about 45 watts per hour to run at the factory set freezer temp. The modded fridge is set with the Johnson controller to 38˚F and run about 15 watts per hour.

I purchased this item so that the small freezer in my basement could be converted to a fridge for aging barleywine ale. I had been keeping this beer in my basement on a shelf and the temps had been nice most of the summer for aging. However as the fall starts to roll in, the furnace will be kicking in within the next several weeks and while my "man cave" basement will be nice, cozy, and comfy for watching movies and playing video games, it will be much too high for aging my favorite barleywine ales.The installation was simple...no drilling or clumsy screws to deal with. I've set my thermostat to an alcohol-comfortable aging temp of about 48 degrees, easy to do with this device. My freezer has become my new man-cave fridge with several bottles of barleywine waiting to be opened over the next several years. The thermostat regulates the temperature keeping it constant, turning the freezer on and off periodically.I couldn't be happier with this solution as it turned my freezer from what had been a large box taking up space without much frozen food in it to a valuable and useful beer aging fridge. The cost was also at least $50 cheaper than if I had gone ahead and bought a small fridge for this purpose plus I didn't have to worry about finding space for a new fridge. One of my best purchases of any kind this year.

I purchased this controller to work with a chest freezer for a fermentation chamber. I will start by saying that this unit does control the temp of my wort within a pretty tight (3 degree F) range.My only problem is that the temperature on the dial does not seem to be very accurate. I have placed my probe into the mason jar of vodka that I have for the terminal end of my blowoff tube, and to test it, I also placed a separate thermometer that I know to be accurate. The temperature frequently gets about 5 degrees higher than the set point on the controller before the freezer kicks in. Thankfully the fact that my 5 gallons of wort responds slowly to temperature changes (yes, I monitor the temp of the wort separately... I know... Geek) means that I can make the adjustments and pretty much let the controller do it's thing. I just do not know if I would be comfortable using the controller without knowing the ambient temp in the freezer or the core temp of the wort.That said, this controller does the job for me and was able to do it for a very reasonable price.