So there I was, driving into work today, and there's a semi-industrial area I'm always scanning for good finds. I drive past a few huge dumpsters full of scrap, and my eye catches the gleam of stainless steel (yeah, you know what i'm sayin' )
I find this huge institutional sized coffee maker, and it's not too messed up:
On to the good stuff. It's got 10 AWG wire, designed to run off 220v, and has a relatively massive heating element inside the tank. In the center picture, from left to right, you're looking at:
-The top of the tank
-Its thermostat
-Above that is a breaker or relay
-To the right of that is a brew timer
-On the bottom right is a blue high temp solenoid valve that lets the hot water into the sprinkler for sparging the coffee.
On to the nitty gritty. The tank was NASTY. The element is burly, on the side it says it's 6000w. I wonder what I'll net if i use it with 115v? I think though, in the interest of a clean build, I may very well replace it with a smaller, nicer 2000w one.
So then I moved on down to the midsection, in here there is a terminal block along with another solenoid valve that percolates the water. Wouldn't ya know it, as soon as I took off the panel, a schematic fell out! I doubt I'll use it, because I have no interest in resurrecting the controllers. A PID will work much better.
Then I moved onto the bottom section. There's more wiring, silicon tubing, and interestingly, the warmer is simply a ceramic heater in a loop under the surface of the chassis. I really had to shake my head when I saw how similar these things are to our brewing systems. The silicon tubing is identical to what B3 sells
SO I got the tank out (reference the soda can for size comparison) and I think it's somewhere around 3+ gallons. I kept most of the fasteners, etc. in a ziplock bag.
Countertop Single Vessel Brewery!
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Linear Mode
