We have built a 1bbl set using 3 - 55 gallon stainless steel drums. We have followed Kal's design (from the electric brewery.com) including the forum pages for setups of 30+ gallons or more. We have a HLT that has two 4500 Watt elements in it. The HLT has the 50' stainless coil with a 1/2" ID.
We are having problems with mash temp control. We could control the mash temp on our test batch at all so we tried it again today with just water. We had the HLT set to 157 degree which it was holding perfectly. Our water temp in the mash tun was 148 degrees. We recirculated the Mash tun water thru the coil inside the HLT for at least 30 minutes and the mashtun temp only rose 1 degree to 149. It would occasionally fall back to 148 too. The temp of the water that passed thru the coil and reentered the mash tun was 153 degrees so it was obviously being heated while running through the coil in the HLT. For some reason it was never really heating the water in the mashtun as a whole though. We confirmed the readings of the temp probe were accurate with another thermometer. We had 11 gallons of water in our mashtun.
We had several problems with air bubbles and getting the pump to prime properly. We are using the following pump:
Chugger Stainless Steel Brewing Pump Center Inlet (Comparable to March 809-SS-HS-C)
It has a 3/4" inlet and 1/2" outlet.
We tested the flowrate of the pump directly out of mashtun to be about 3GPM and also running through the 50" stainless steel coil and up to the top of the mashtun as 2GPM. Is it possible we are simply not getting enough flow to heat up the water in the mashtun fast enough? I'm wondering if we should get a pump that has an 8GPM flow rate.
Any ideas would be helpful. Pictures of set up are attached.
Thank you,
We are having problems with mash temp control. We could control the mash temp on our test batch at all so we tried it again today with just water. We had the HLT set to 157 degree which it was holding perfectly. Our water temp in the mash tun was 148 degrees. We recirculated the Mash tun water thru the coil inside the HLT for at least 30 minutes and the mashtun temp only rose 1 degree to 149. It would occasionally fall back to 148 too. The temp of the water that passed thru the coil and reentered the mash tun was 153 degrees so it was obviously being heated while running through the coil in the HLT. For some reason it was never really heating the water in the mashtun as a whole though. We confirmed the readings of the temp probe were accurate with another thermometer. We had 11 gallons of water in our mashtun.
We had several problems with air bubbles and getting the pump to prime properly. We are using the following pump:
Chugger Stainless Steel Brewing Pump Center Inlet (Comparable to March 809-SS-HS-C)
It has a 3/4" inlet and 1/2" outlet.
We tested the flowrate of the pump directly out of mashtun to be about 3GPM and also running through the 50" stainless steel coil and up to the top of the mashtun as 2GPM. Is it possible we are simply not getting enough flow to heat up the water in the mashtun fast enough? I'm wondering if we should get a pump that has an 8GPM flow rate.
Any ideas would be helpful. Pictures of set up are attached.
Thank you,
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