How long should it take to send wort to FV?

[Krausen89]

So we have been at this a little while, slowly altering and dialing in this brew house for our needs. one thing that i have been questioning is the time it takes to send the beer to the fermenter. for a 4-5BBL batch its takes somewhere like 3-4 hours to send the wort down. Does this sound about right? (its the worst part of the process)

The pump works well when not sending through the chiller and i realize the chiller will slow it down a bit as it a smaller diameter and needs to do its thing and i would think this probably varies depending on the chiller. Ours is built in on the Prospero brewhouse. We are sending wort downstairs through the floor. Up until yesterday there is a valve attached to a pipe that sits about waist level that we sent the beer to and then in the cellar its about chest level maybe a little lower also there is a longer than necessary hose going from BH to that valve. My thinking is with the long hose and the fact that the pump has to fight gravity to get up to that valve before it flows down it could be slowing it down. there was a hole already in the floor the size of a hose so we sent the hose straight down and it reaches the floor. Tonight we will be testing this to see if gravity helps speed up the process. The chiller has no problem cooling it and i have to be careful not to over-chill to the point we can't pitch the yeast so we should be able to move the wort a bit faster than trickling 5bbls into a FV after a long night

Thank you in advance for any input

[Jim Lieb]

Transfer from the kettle to the fermentor for that size system should be less than 30 minutes. There must be something over restricting the flow, or using to small diameter hosing, to take as long as you are saying. Do you have a valve that you use to restrict the flow after oxygen input? That may be closed to much. I would check the entire transfer line for restrictions of some sort and find the spot that is causing the problem. I have a 7 bbl. system and it takes less than 30 minutes to transfer, even in the summer when the cooling water is on the warm side. once you think you have the problem area solved, I would run water through just to check.

Jim

[Krausen89]

Transfer from the kettle to the fermentor for that size system should be less than 30 minutes. There must be something over restricting the flow, or using to small diameter hosing, to take as long as you are saying. Do you have a valve that you use to restrict the flow after oxygen input? That may be closed to much. I would check the entire transfer line for restrictions of some sort and find the spot that is causing the problem. I have a 7 bbl. system and it takes less than 30 minutes to transfer, even in the summer when the cooling water is on the warm side. once you think you have the problem area solved, I would run water through just to check.

Jim

We have gone over it multiple times looking for restrictions. There was a few things we saw that might have something to do with it like the wrong rubber o- rings but we haven't found anything. I thought maybe it was the chiller restricting it but we went through that and there is no build up that we see. Into the chiller and out of it, the diameter of pipe does decrease. So it may just be a bad design on this system. Last Night with the changes we made it took about 2 hours to transfer. I will take some pics of what im talking about and post them here.

[dick murton]

Does the hot wort have to "climb" uphill to get to the pump? Or does it flow horizontally, or even downward to the pump inlet?

What is the design outlet pressure of your pump, and at what flow rate? If you have the pump ID, and if appropriate, the impeller diameter, you should be able to pick up a pump curve from the internet if you have not already been supplied with one.

All pipes & hoses exert a slight restriction, but I suspect these are not the reason for you problem. The plate heat exchanger probably give more resistance than the pipes / hoses, especially as the general direction is "downhill" Again, you should have a pressure drop quoted in the PHE literature, dependent upon the flow rate - the higher the flow, the higher the pressure drop across the PHE.

If you didn't take the PHE apart and inspect all the plates, but merely looked in through the feed and discharge ports, it could be that the PHE is horribly fouled. Ideally, you would be cleaning with backwards flow at 130 to 150 % of maximum design forward flow (chilling) rate.