What's Been The Most Inaccurate Equipment You Have Bought?

[Online Brewing Supplies]

Do the refractometers come with instructions. I just ordered one a couple of days ago

Yeh Instructions :dont use it and put it in the cupboard like the rest of us. :lol: I dont like them but other do.I m sure you will get a response from a retailer to counter my opinion.
GB

 

[Polar Beer]

Instructions that came with my Coopers HB kit many years ago.

 

[buttersd70]

What's Been The Most Inaccurate Equipment You Have Bought?

Muckey. h34r:

 

[Weizguy]

nope. I did start mucking around with the various tools on beersmith, but eventually I cracked the ***** and packed it into the cupboard. Really, what I need to do is spend a bit more time finding out how to use the thing properly, I suppose.

I'm fairly happy with the accuracy of my refractometer.
Use the refractometer tool in Beersmith and you're on.

Recently pitched an Arrogant clone at S.G. of1.059. 4 days later, I had 11.0 Brix on my refracto reading. Not 1.047 or so, but with the O.G. coded and choose the fermenting wort option, that Brix reading gives me 1.034 (S.G.), 3.3% abv, 41% apparent attenuation.
Easy, and mighty close to accurate, within the range of our equipment, with probably only one significant digit of accuracy.

Ever wonder why you can be so far off expected gravity? Too many readings with one significant digit can add up to zero significant digits, leaving all calculations subject to error.

 

[jonw]

Welcome back PP

+1

I have problems with my refracto, but that's probably because I haven't got the hang of it, rather than it being inaccurate.

I have a mashmaster dial thermo in my tun. I have no idea whether or not it's accurate as I've never calibrated it. Doesn't really matter though, as I know what kind of beer I'm going to get when it says 66deg vs. when it says 69deg. I guess at least it must be consistent.

 

[jjeffrey]

This imho is the source of all th deviation head scratching sessions new refractometer users are getting and beer brewers have one more head scratching to do than wine or mead brewers.

...

Beers, each style needs a calibration for Plato conversion from Brix.

This is what I figured. It seems like a lot of work without any real gain in accuracy to me (from a beer brewing perspective). Wouldn't be so bad if I just brewed lagers or just brewed stouts, but what's the fun that? I'm not fussed about the volume used for hydrometers- the attraction of using a refractometer was that temperature correction shouldn't be so much of an issue compared with hydrometers (I really get impatient waiting for the sample to cool, and it's easy to cool too much with ice water).

Still, I can use it to calibrate my hydrometers using a sucrose solution....

Thanks BP.

 

[MHB]

For me it was a bunch (12) of cheap Chinese thermometers, there was a 20^oC temp spread, went back to the maker PDQ, now I only stock the good English thermometers.

As this thread has wandered totally off topic

Lots of handy formulae

MHB

 

[FNQ Bunyip]

Good too see ya around "old Mate" never having botherd to check my array of differant equipment it all seems fine...

however Pat you should know that this thread belongs in gear and equip & not All Grain...

cheers

 

[PistolPatch]

Thanks A3k for the feedback on my old trusties. Thanks also to the you know who's like Fents. And FNQ, I can't believe I put this in the wrong forum - I think I was typing whilst talking to Tony's wife about a measurement problem she was having

Interesting to see the above inaccuracies and better still to see that a good few brewers are aware of them. Apart from my 4lt jug that is actually 3 lts, I think the scariest post was the one from MHB with thermometers being 20 degrees out. What is scarier is I am sure that there would be some retailers, focussed on kits and essences, that would have actually gone and sold these thermometers by just putting 2 or 3 on display at any one time!

There actually was a real reason why I put this in the all-grain forum. Mash failures and efficiency miracles are more often caused by inaccurate measuring devices or methods than anything else. Too often when someone has a problem with efficiency we ignore these basics and jump straight to something like pH.

braufrau said, "Don't start me on thermometers!" I echo that and then add, "or hydrometers, refractometers and volume jugs!"

And, this, of course, leads to, "Don't start me on efficiency!!!"

I have a dream...

I have a dream that before any brewer quotes efficiency, they will calibrate their thermometers at 0, 9, 18, 66 and 100 degrees, their hydrometers to OGs and FGs and their volume vessles by weight on the accurate scales they use to measure their grain

I have a dream that one day all of the brewerhood will rise up and say, "clear beer into packaging," is the only true measure of efficiency between different brewers and different styles of brewing.

I have a dream that one day new brewers will not focus on efficiency but by the enjoyment they receive from their beer.

I have a dream that one day the brewers of fly, fly no-chill, batch, batch no-chill, BIAB, BIAB no-chill, will be able to sit down together at a table of brewerhood and say...

"Top beer braufrau! How'd you brew it?"
"I used 5kgs of this grain and this amount of hops at these times and temps which gave me 19lts of clear beer into my kegs or bottles at this ABV."
"Have you got an efficiency figure for me to work off?"
"Yep! It was x% batch and no-chilled into fermenter."
"Thanks brau, I'll look up my tables so I can BIAB and Nev loved it too so I'll send him the fly no-chilled recipe as well."

Of course, we already can do the above but only if we have accurate equipment and measurement methods and also realise that...

a) No home brewer can ever measure accurateley on a single brew - three identical brews and you can start feeling a bit confident but even this will be only with your own equipment. (For example, syphoning clear beer through an 8mm inside diameter hose will be different from syphoning clear beer through a 12mm inside diameter hose. Oh! And what do you think is an acceptable level of cloudiness compared to me?)
B) We need to start quoting either efficiency into packaging figures (probably 50 to 60%) or efficiency figures that clearly specify at what stage of brewing measurements were taken and what method of brewing was used.
c) We must acknowledge that at the home-brewing level, we will never get a high degree of accuracy on efficiency figures no matter at what stage they are taken.
d) Efficiency figures, even if specified correctly from brewer to brewer, just give the other brewer a starting point - nothing more. Original gravity and the volume of clear chilled wort are the most informative figures to convey to fellow brewers who know their equipment.

Whoops! Another over-long and way too-detailed post from me. I'll be in trouble from ThirstyBoy as he sent me a great draft of some BIAB FAQs about six weeks ago. Any time I have, I keep re-writing them over and over, trying to get them spot on. I think the above shows why it isn't that easy writing answers to FAQ's, especially where they concern efficiency and more particularly when they are going to be read mainly by new brewers.

Great to have the above response but I better get my head back into the BIAB FAQs so if I don't reply here any more, you know what I am doing.

Thanks and :icon_cheers:
Pat

P.S. Please get into the efficiency argument. Hopefully we can link this thread to the BIAB FAQs!

 

[Cocko]

Last time I hit the delete button!

 

[Thirsty Boy]

The plastic measuring jug I used when I first started brewing was a nice cheap 2L jobbie - except that it held just short of 2.5L when filled to the 2L mark. Could never understand why all my volumes were so out between various containers.

Volumes are all now taken using plastic lab measuring devices (jugs, cylinders) and checked against (assuming 1L/kg of water) the two sets of scales I own. the 5kg +/-1g scales I use for grain and the 100g +/-0.01 scales I use for hops - both have been callibrated against each other, against at least one other set of comparable scales and against their own and another set of calibration weights.

My dirt cheap e-bay refracto - measures within 0.1 brix of the (converted to plato) density meter at work across a wide range - it does not however do as great a job of auto temp adjusting as it should. So I still have to chill a sample down from "boiling" to a more reasonable temp before it will read accurately and consistently. An eyedropper full does chill down pretty fast under the tap though. I haven't used a hydrometer in ages.... but I did calibrate it against the density meter and they agree closely enough. The density meter is calibrated by a lab tech every day - he may or may not be doing a good job.

I own one relatively expensive lab grade thermometer - it reads -0.5 in an ice slurry, 100 in boiling distilled water, 37 under my tongue and 50+/- 1 in a 50/50 volume mix of boiling water and 0 water (I suspect the +/- 1 is due to an inability to make the mix as accurately as the thermometer can read its temperature) - thats pretty accurate in my book and all my other thermometers are calibrated vs that one

I like accurate equipment and I like it to be more precise than I need if that is possible - that dogey jug really pissed me off and has made this a bugbear for me.

I quote pre-boil efficiency - and it is accurate. Clear beer into packaging informs me of nothing unless you tell me a massive raft of extraneous information about your brewing process that I dont want to and dont need to know. If you dont want to use efficiency, just quote compositiopn % for the grain bill plus the figures. 85% Pale, 15% munich, OG 1.051. Done. All you need to know.