jjeffrey
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- Joined
- 4/6/05
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I know a lot of people love their HERMS setup, but I loathed mine. I have a 2 vessle setup- gas fired kettle and mash/lauter tun. I use the kettle also as a HLT. I had an immersion coil which sat in the kettle, through which i'd pump my wort. Kettle would heat/hold sparge water whilst I switch the pump on or off to regulate temperature in the mash.
It worked ok, but I found it cumbersome for a number of reasons:
I started off just trying to make the HERMS more efficient, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that a RIMS would pretty much solve everything. So I made this:
Specs:
Does it work? Don't know. Just after I took these photos I went to start circulating but found that I'd put one of the check balls back to front in the diaphragm pump when I cleaned it last- now I've gotta pull it apart and fix it before I start. I'm glad I went to try with water first- it would have been bad had I 12kg of grain in the tun whilst I mucked around with the pump. Hopefully I'll have it commissioned later today.
jj.
It worked ok, but I found it cumbersome for a number of reasons:
- Manual handling. My kettle is elevated, and I needed to lift an 18m long copper immersion coil filled with wort in and out, often with the kettle hot. There's no way I would have got away with that sort of operation at work, it wasn't safe- WorkSafe would be on my arse in a flash. When the coil wasn't in the kettle I had to find space on the floor for it, and I was constantly tripping over it. The long hose length required also created clutter. I know some people would (and have) say "why don't you just set up a separate HLT and keep the coil in there instead of creating clutter on the floor?". Well, in doing that, I'm not really reducing my footprint, and it increases setup complexity (something I'd prefer to avoid).
- Cleaning. More hose, more coil, more cleaning. I hate this aspect of brewing.
- Water heating time. Heat your sparge water and control the mash at the same time thus saving time, right? It takes me a little under an hour to heat 60L of sparge water, so the times don't work out for me. This means I generally gotta heat up 80L BEFORE I dough in. Usually I'm still twiddling my thumbs come 10AM.
- Temperature response in the mash tun. Unless I got the water in the kettle to boiling (i.e. too hot for sparge), my ramp times were way too long.
I started off just trying to make the HERMS more efficient, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that a RIMS would pretty much solve everything. So I made this:
Specs:
- Element: 2.5kW single phase low density element, 600 long, 25mm in diameter. It's pretty big but with low heat output so that I can minimise the surface temperature (and hence maillard reactions) whilst still getting the heat into the fluid. I based the size on a couple of degrees every 10 minutes, whilst still being able to suck enough juice out of a standard power point to do the job. This was the most expensive bit of the whole kit, representing 70% of the overall cost.
- Control via PID controller with high speed solid state pulse output. Temp probe is in the end of the unit (RTD).
- Cleaning real easy. the whole thing comes apart by undoing the triclovers.
Does it work? Don't know. Just after I took these photos I went to start circulating but found that I'd put one of the check balls back to front in the diaphragm pump when I cleaned it last- now I've gotta pull it apart and fix it before I start. I'm glad I went to try with water first- it would have been bad had I 12kg of grain in the tun whilst I mucked around with the pump. Hopefully I'll have it commissioned later today.
jj.