Over buying on pump?

[MacatawaAleCo]

Hey everyone,

We are looking to purchase our portable pump to use as our workhorse until we can afford to make some upgrades. The pump will initially be used for hot wort transfer, keg cleaning, and fermenter cleaning. We are looking at a Top-Flo C114MD 2hp because the price point is only a couple hundred more than the 1hp model. Our logic behind this is that this larger pump will be able to be used for years as we grow and move to a larger system.

Until then we figured that we could just add a valve and adjust the VFD to reach the desired flow rate for our 3BBL system. I was hoping for some feed back about this and any recommendations on if we would be better off just getting the smaller model for now and just buying more pumps as we grow. I know that bigger isn't always better and was worried that this would be one of those cases!

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

[CPESystems]

Maybe a bit big

Hi Andrew,

A 2 HP pump is larger than you are going to need for a 3 BBL system and there is no problem with using it if you have a VFD but not as a fixed speed pump.

Here are a few things to consider.

1. Get a VFD for your pump - you will be better off with a 1 HP or 1 1/2 HP pump with a VFD than with a 2 HP single speed pump.
2. What electric service do you have? 1 1/2 HP is the biggest you can practically run on a 115 volt circuit
3. If you only have single phase a converting VFD can be used to control the speed of your pump but you need a 3 phase motor

[MacatawaAleCo]

Thank you for your response!

Anyways, a couple things I should have mentioned in the initial post was that we have 3 phase and wanted to use the 2hp pump assembly from you guys that comes on the portable pump with the VFD. I spoke with Tony yesterday but was just trying to get some confirmation from some other brewers before making the commitment to the 2hp pump.

The nice part of the 2hp would be that it could be used as we grow as well. However,the smaller pump would be more practical and likely could still be used for other tasks around the brewery regardless of if we are still brewing on a 3BBL or 20 BBL. I just am more concerned that we will drop $2000-$2500 and be disappointed that we either a) didn't get big enough pump or b) got to big of a pump and are unable to make it work !

Additional thoughts would be appreciated!

Andrew

[TGTimm]

We use 2 C114s with 1hp 3P motors. One is our vorlauf pump, which we run on a VFD. It has plenty of oomph for building a nice mash bed in an 18 bbl mash tun, running, IIRC, at about 35 Hz. It's also the transfer pump to the kettle. The other is cart-mounted, used for light CIP purposes. It doesn't have the power to spin a CIP ball in a fermenter.

Hope this gives some grounds for comparison--