Nullnvoid
Well-Known Member
I think it's more they are a new business and don't have the capital. So they need to sell to free up money to buy/make more.
Could just be making that up.
Could just be making that up.
KegLand Questions and Answers
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Another factor is how fast can they handle stock coming in. No point having 10 containers coming in at once if you can only handle 2 per week.
Kenf
Well-Known Member
Hi guys just to let you know refilled the cylinder again yesterday and the BPV (the new replacement) shot across the room!
After much discussion we decided not to refit the valve as it is too dangerous, but to instead to reduce the cylinders life by half. I don’t want to responsible for seriously hurting someone and I figure by the time the cylinder is 10 years old I will be 67 and may not actually need it (if you know what I mean).
Apparently it is a fault with most steel gas cylinders made in China! They seem to have an attitude of “well we will make things cheap and if it fails we just replace it”. Even the renowned Grainfather- if it is faulty, new unit supplied!
I have noticed the Robobrew parts I have ordered to upgrade my Grainfather are a bit thinner - but they work so thankyou!
Sorry about the rant but I thought people should know!
Cheers
After much discussion we decided not to refit the valve as it is too dangerous, but to instead to reduce the cylinders life by half. I don’t want to responsible for seriously hurting someone and I figure by the time the cylinder is 10 years old I will be 67 and may not actually need it (if you know what I mean).
Apparently it is a fault with most steel gas cylinders made in China! They seem to have an attitude of “well we will make things cheap and if it fails we just replace it”. Even the renowned Grainfather- if it is faulty, new unit supplied!
I have noticed the Robobrew parts I have ordered to upgrade my Grainfather are a bit thinner - but they work so thankyou!
Sorry about the rant but I thought people should know!
Cheers
We are still in the process of making these. We had a number of different designs manufactured but in big drops it was still possible to cause a small amount of damage to the regulator so we are making some minor changes to make the design even stronger. With that said we do have a number of units sitting around the factory now that we can sell as seconds and prototypes so if you want these then please email us and we can provide one of these to you. The ones we have at the moment are still a lot better than nothing but we still would like to make further changes before we release them.
We are trying to work that out at the moment.
The mill can be powered with a drill but really the best possible solution is to power with the DC motor that we have designed it for.
When you use the drill you can sometimes end up spinning the rollers too fast and this slightly compromises the results. A properly geared motor really gives better results.
Also we have currently got rollers made from hardened stainless steel and also from hardened steel. We are starting to see some customers want to use stainless steel as they are wet milling or conditioning their grain before milling. This also improves results but at the same time if too much moisture gets into the rollers it can cause the hardened steel ones to get some rust on them.
With that said the hardened steel is harder so the sharp knurling/hobbing lasts longer but the stainless is more corrosion resistant. This is still something we have not decided on. We also have one last possible thing that we are doing some testing on and that is using stainless steel substrate but then coating the roller with various other coatings to improve hardness and therefore improve long term performance. So even though we have some stock in the warehouse at the moment we were discussing just two days ago if we hold off on the launch for a bit longer while we complete some further testing on roller surface treatments.
Why don't you just have both options available? With interchangeable rollers, so if I go the hardened route and later want stainless, I just buy the rollers and swap them out.
I know it's very frustrating when we talk about new product releases and then the date is postponed for release and sometimes we dont actually know when products will be released.
For quite a lot of the stuff that we are doing it's new to the market. It's never been made before and in the area of product development we are constantly finding out better ways of doing things. It's often the case that we feel a product will be completed at a certain time but during the development process we find other features we can add on or improve the product further. Every time we find an improvement we are faced with the option to just sell what we have or then improve the product further.
The FermZilla is an exact example of this. Even though we are generally quite happy with the product we have held back from bringing more in as we have found a new way we can make the dump valve and collection container works. Changes like this are time consuming and they have involved us making new injection moulded tooling but we feel that it's well worth the wait if we want the finished products to be perfect.
The grains are something that we have made a lot of changes with and we will have all this in stock soon. We are just now completing Australia first fully automated recipe/grain bill weighing machine. So all the grains are stored in about 50 hoppers. The grains are dispensed automatically into a weighing system that is integrated with the website and accounting software.
As you have pointed out. Consumables are not really our primary focus. With that said people want to come to a one stop shop and if we are going to do grains we want to make the process as automated as possible so we are not wasting time and losing efficiency with grain orders. As this weighing system is almost completed you will soon see all the grain types available on the website but we didnt want to put the grains up until the software and hardware was fully integrated and working.
Yes we do have capital and space constraints as you have pointed out and we are operating at the limit of these constraints. We also had no idea that the business would grow this fast in only 420 odd days that we have been operating. Things are certainly getting easier and more and more stock across the board is coming in.
To my understanding this issue has already been resovled. We have already sent out free replacements to the people who have identified they have a faulty valve. The new valve looks like this:
https://www.kegland.com.au/replacement-residual-pressure-rpv-for-co2-cylinder-valve.html
The RPV valves are an important safety device and although some customers remove them all together this particular deice is something that decreases the chance of getting contamination into the cylinder so its important that its working correctly. Can you please email us your order number and details so we can rectify this for you.
Moad
Well-Known Member
This sounds really cool, would love to read / see more about how you’ve done this. I find automation and tech very interesting especially when it applies to beer!
Kenf
Well-Known Member
I have the new version already MG 100009913, remember? We went through a whole heap of stuff with Matt at Toormina & Dave at Ikegger.
I don’t want another one and like I said I doubt that I will using the cylinder in 10 years time.
Cheers anyway
This sounds amazing. Let us know more once its up and running!!
Nullnvoid
Well-Known Member
That could really be dangerous if it hit someone.
Yes I was wondering about this but then again if you sell like that then I am pretty sure the equipment would need to be tested and approved because that is something I think consumer affairs is pretty serious about. Like with scales used in commerce you have to get them tested regularly by registered organisations. No doubt Kegland guys would make sure about that I would imagine.
Thomas Wood
Well-Known Member
Hi Kegland, when are you guys planning on getting the Robobrew V3.1 in? There's a number of good looking additions to it. Thanks.
If this is something that you really want to see we can do a video on it.
There were a few reasons that we wanted to make the grain weighing automatic:
1. One of the main reasons is so we can get accurate total weights that are more consistent that weighing by hand and that can be recorded and audited at a later date.
2. So we can reduce the associated labour cost related to weighing out grain.
3. So we can make sure the grain is correctly turned over. Historically it's quite common practice to put grain into bins. What can happen in this instance is the bin gets the top of the grain purchased and then the bin gets topped up with more grain. As a result the grain at the bottom of the bin can be quite stale and may not be turned over and kept fresh. But as our hoppers will be filled up from the top and dispensed from the underside and thus use FIFO principle.
4. Typically bins need to be opened and closed frequently every time the grain is purchased. This increases the ingress of moist air into the grain bin. Hopefully this system will limit/reduce the amount of moist air getting into the bin and therefore keep the grain dryer and therefore fresher.
So definitely accuracy of weighing are one of the major reasons for us to spend the time and money to develop this system.
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