Manway leaking

[Helltown]

We have a tank with a shadowless manway that tends to leak after a few days into fermentation and wondered if anyone else has experienced this and what the solution was? It's happened 3 times to us now and we see no rhyme or reason to it. Only thing we can think of is the gasket isn't on "perfect" and the expanding/contracting with the glycol somehow caused it to allow for a leak.

And when I say leaking, it is a very steady stream that wasn't there for the first 3-4 days... We'll loose BBLs...

Any ideas?

[BrewinLou]

First thing I would do is inspect the L out of that gasket. Then replace it. They are cheap enough. Next is take the gasket off the manway and close the door in it's natural position. Look for any large gaps around where the door meets the tank. Are you tightening the manway down well enough. I have a couple old dairy tanks that I have to use a six foot cheater bar on. Good luck

[jk_brewer]

We have had the same issues on one of our shadowless 60 bbl tanks. We removed the door flipped it upside down, bent the bar that hold the door vertically, and it still leaks but less often. We have noticed that the direction of the grain of the metal in the door does not match the direction of the grain on the tank. The grain didn't match before altering it either.

[kugeman]

Who is the manufacturer of the tank? I used to have lots of problems with my JVNW shadowless manways leaking. It turns out that the vertical bar that holds the door closed (called a cross-arm assembly) would slowly bend until it wouldn't effectively hold the door tight.

I purchased a couple of extras and would swap them out when needed. Then I had a welder cut & reweld the cross arms back into their proper position. But they invariably would bend again over time.

[tringali]

With JVNW tanks you will get a better seal with the light grey silicone gaskets (that they also sell) compared to the harder black ones that most of their tanks ship with. Overtightening just makes things worse in the long run as the door bends.

[calltmont]

We had the same problem with most of our ABT tanks that we just bought. Our fix was to place the manway door against a heavy block wall using blocks of wood behind either side. We applied more than a slight pressure against the middle with our forklift. Set the parking brake overnight, problem solved.