I always use a swamp cooler (my wife keeps our place similar to a nursing home) and rotate 1L frozen water bottles every 12hrs for the first few days, then every 24hrs after that. But yes, the temps inside probably hit 75, I'll never know for sure though given the gear I have.
I just wrapped foil around the tube that goes into the jug, I didn't have a second rubber stopper there, so all pressure should have been relieved via bubbles... which I timed to still be about 91 beats per minute last night after reattaching everything. Going forward I may just move my kid's baby monitor to the closet to get the real answer as to how fast things took off and, like you said, to see what/where things got jammed up.