Building my own stand.

Hello Everyone,
So I am finally building my own stand when I get back from my deployment, it's going to be a weldless erector set type, and I was going to get these burners http://www.bayouclassicdepot.com/bg14_cast_iron_burner.htm and later down the road I am going to automate my system with 3 PID controllers one for each keggle and was wondering do I need to go low pressure burners to do that or will thoughts work with the right equipment ( regulator, pilot valve, etc.) and if so what pilot valve and regulator do I get all I know is that you want a regulator that is equal to the BTU's of all the burners if that’s the case do I need to rind a regulator that for 630,000 BTU's or am I understanding this wrong? I have looked in the search for this but I guess I’m still not getting it, so any help would be appreciated, thanks.

AFAIK that burner can be run on high pressure propane, low pressure propane, or NG by using the corresponding orifice. How cheap/easy it is to automate low pressure vs high pressure depends on how safe you want your burners to be. If you want the gas to shut off if the pilot goes out, low pressure is cheaper/easier to automate. For each burner you'd need a standing pilot furnace valve, a pilot, and a thermocouple. To do the same with high pressure requires each burner to have 2 solenoid valves, a pliot, and an ignition module, which is a bit more costly than the low pressure set-up. If you're not concerned about the safety aspect, you can use either high or low pressure with a simple solenoid valve and a pilot.

Keep in mind that it's unlikely you'd ever have all three burners going full blast at once, so the regulator doesn't need to supply the combined max output of all three burners. My 200,000 btu regulator works fine for me, but my system is a HERMS with only two burners, one for the HLT and one for the BK, and they're rarely both firing at the same time.

I'm not sure what your plans are, but most systems only automate the HLT and MLT burners, and leave the BK burner manual since it only needs to be lit once for a brew session. Skipping the PID, valves, pilot. etc for automating the BK burner could save you some money.

Ok cool I never really thought about that I wont need to automate my BK I think ill go low pressure, what kind of orifice will I need I'm looking at some and none of them say low pressure how do I know?

BeerGuy1000 said:

Ok cool I never really thought about that I wont need to automate my BK I think ill go low pressure, what kind of orifice will I need I'm looking at some and none of them say low pressure how do I know?

Click to expand...

The orifice size for running LP at low pressure is in between the sizes for NG (large) and high pressure LP (small). A lot of people just use the high pressure orifice that comes in the burner you linked and then drill it out to the the desired size, which is usually ~ 5/64" - 3/32" for the 10" banjo/hurricane burners. It's a good idea to buy an extra orifice so that you can test each size with it as you drill the hole larger, and then drill the others out to the size that worked best. Not sure if that makes any sense, but I hope it helps. You might find this thread helpful also- https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/high-pressure-vs-low-pressure-orifice-230907/