single vessel heat

[Brwd.By.Boucher]

In the first pic.... from left to right (old BK), BK, MT, HLT....

In order for 2bbl recipes my HLT on the end does not hold enough for sparging. Most recipes need 50 gallon sparge and the HLT with coils is 40. My first few brews I just put more water in the mash and then rinsed with less sparge. I want to make my old BK an addition heated vessel.

What is the cheapest way to make it heat to a maximum of 168 degrees? cheapest manual control possible.....

Untitled by Jeremy Boucher, on Flickr
Untitled by Jeremy Boucher, on Flickr

[augiedoggy]

Why cant you just add more water to your HLT and preheat to target sparge temp before sparging? thats what we are doing on our 3 bbl setup which should same kettles as yours proportionately only larger. for some reason your HLT seems much smaller than your mash tun though. (Ours is smaller but with longer legs to make the the same height). The water we add ours heats up to 172 long before our mash is done and we need to sparge. How many elements do you have in your HLT ?

[augiedoggy]

just for reference, These are our kettles

[Brwd.By.Boucher]

My control panel only allows you to be (BK) (off) (HLT) you cant boil and HLT same time.

[augiedoggy]

My control panel only allows you to be (BK) (off) (HLT) you cant boil and HLT same time.

Mine too due to power limitations... What im suggesting is adding more water to your hlt and heating it up for sparge while your mashing for an hour. We dont use our BK until after the mash and sparge.

EDIT* I just realized you mentioned a coil which im now guessing is a herms coil. This does complicate things a bit. Most people with this setup will heat their strike water in the Boil kettle and leave their HLT full of sparge water at mash temps you would have to heat one just over temp a bit then the other.

[Brwd.By.Boucher]

yea... unfortunately my HLT(HERMS) is only 40 gallons.....

Today I will warm strike water (70 gallons) in Boil Kettle, transfer 50 gallons to MT, add grain.... and recirculate mash for the hour...

Then I will transfer the leftover 20 gal from BK1 to (old) BK2 while I start sparging using the 40 gallon from the HLT... with pump 1, the pump 2 will start moving the wort from the MT into the BK1....

As the HLT starts to drop I will start using a third pump to move the 20 gallons from (old) BK2 to the HLT to warm and essentially join the sparge on way to the MT......

1/3 of my system I purchased used.....

[davidn]

<EDIT> I just realised I am answering a question you didn't ask...

yea... unfortunately my HLT(HERMS) is only 40 gallons.....

I have a 1BBL system that uses a small vessel (maybe 5 litres) for the HERMS. The heating element in it is pretty small, can be run on a standard 10amp wall plug, and it runs on a separate circuit to the HLT. The bloke I bought the system from put it all through a single panel using a BCS460 and two power circuits (10amp and 15amp), but you could easily rig something up to control the HERMS temp to match your Mash temp, such as an STC 1000.

Here's a rough diagram - you would get the water in the HERMS nice and hot before you mash in, then the controller maintains the appropriate temp as your mash recirculates. You would just plug this into an every day wall socket, the element would only need to 1.8 - 2.2 kW

[augiedoggy]

I would recommend against using an stc1000 as it has hysteresis control with a 10a mechanical relay that will fail in short order trying to turn on and off to maintain a temp. the relay contacts will over heat and burn up.
There are many cheap temp controllers that can utilize the proper solid state relays for this task you can even buy a combo on ebay which includes a mypin pid, pt100 temp probe and an SSR with heat sink for around $40... If you have multiple elements you will likely want an SSR for each which can easily be wired in parallel off the pid. if you have a large quantity of elements you could use an ssr or mosfet to power the other ssrs as the pid only puts out a control signal with so much current. I think for 3 elements though this wouldnt be be needed. However I think your still back at your original issue of only having the power to heat one kettle at a time...

Honestly you might just want to look into ditching the herms and going with a rims tube which would offer you more flexibility.