Geez a month goes quick. Not much progress on the brewery itself however have put about 100hrs into the programming.
I decided to put a form of HERMS/RIMS on it so that I have something to play with. It's basically an oil filled tube with a 4500W heater and an outer tube for the wort to flow past. The programming time has been mostly on the cascade control loop that I want to try for the HERMS which should better control temperature than a single PID loop. I used motor oil for the trial so I can get good temp rises by running the oil up to 150 degC.
The cascade controller uses a master loop that looks at the wort outlet temperature and sends the CV of that loop to the setpoint of the second loop which controls the temperature of the oil in the HERMS, should give me plenty to play around with.
I did a trial run manually switching things a few weeks ago and it was super fun. Turned out around 150L of 1.052 from 25odd kg of grain. Really liked the replicated micro process and using 3V again, so awesome is 3V!.
Brew day went well except I didn't calc for temp drop once grain was added. I just assumed 2 deg as per my 1V but with the thicker mash obviously needs to be way hotter before grain added, like 8 or 9 degrees next time. Rookie mistake. It did give me a chance to test ramping the mash temp. Ramped from 60 to 66 using the two MT heat belts and the HERMS in about 20 mins manually switching on and off heaters which was a real pain, need the PLC up and running.
The boil using gas was good(was reluctant to go gas), hit 10% boil off rate using 25psi on a single banjo burner. Still think I will go 2 x 5kw elements in the kettle when I get the shed power upgraded.
Ran the HLT at 80 deg and bled in cold on the way to MT to hit target temp worked well.
Clean up was pretty easy with a pressure washer then it was off to visit some breweries and Yobs, all in all one of the better days of the year.
The lauter worked well although I think I should have recirced longer and faster to clear up better. I spent about an hr laugtering but with the 4 x outlets on the base of the MT suspect I can go a lot faster which I will try next time. There is a vid below showing the junk going into the kettle that I will try have the grain bed better filter out next time. Gravity lauter to kettle was just as good as I thought, I used a diaphragm valve to slow the lauter rate to what I was happy with.
With the PLC program nearly done and bench tested it's time to focus on electrical panel build for the next month or so and hopefully fire up properly by Xmas. I have a metric **** tonne of grain after the recent BB to chew through and I drink bugger all these days so going to need help removing cubes! Have a couple of RIS's planned first up which will really test it out.
Anyways some pics to explain progress better:
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