Propane burner efficiency?

Hello,

I'm curious if any of you have the same burner as I, and if so, how many hours of brewing you get out of a 20# tank. Mine is the same as the King Kooker at http://www.northernbrewer.com/burners.html , just with a different frame. I'm GASing pretty bad, because after dumping about $200 on equipment in the last couple weeks (ML tun, kettle and propane burner/tank, wort chiller), I simply can't believe that I don't have the most efficient burner on the market .

Just wondering if any of you out there have the same unit, and what your experiences with it are.

-Aaron

aseelye said:

Hello,

I'm curious if any of you have the same burner as I, and if so, how many hours of brewing you get out of a 20# tank. Mine is the same as the King Kooker at http://www.northernbrewer.com/burners.html , just with a different frame. I'm GASing pretty bad, because after dumping about $200 on equipment in the last couple weeks (ML tun, kettle and propane burner/tank, wort chiller), I simply can't believe that I don't have the most efficient burner on the market .

Just wondering if any of you out there have the same unit, and what your experiences with it are.

-Aaron

Click to expand...

I just purchased this burner.

http://www.cooking.com/products/shprodde.asp?SKU=376480

Both of you'all have great burners but if you want to burn though some serious fuel up grade your regulators to 30 psi and you'll get some serious fuel usage.But the above burners have 10 psi regulators and burn at 60'000 btu's with a 30 psi regulator it will be up graded to 210,000 btu's and burn the hair out of your nose at 30 yds!!!!! really I don't measure efficency because it's BREWING!!!!!!!! and I would do it even if I burned #20lbs per brewing session!!!!

smogman said:

Both of you'all have great burners but if you want to burn though some serious fuel up grade your regulators to 30 psi and you'll get some serious fuel usage.But the above burners have 10 psi regulators and burn at 60'000 btu's with a 30 psi regulator it will be up graded to 210,000 btu's and burn the hair out of your nose at 30 yds!!!!! really I don't measure efficency because it's BREWING!!!!!!!! and I would do it even if I burned #20lbs per brewing session!!!!

Click to expand...

Well, I was more looking at improving efficiency. The burner I have now brought 6.5 gallons to an insane boil, so I'm not concerned with total output, but maximizing my LP tank now. I understand that any burner could have 1million BTUs if you put enough propane through it, so that's not the best way to measure things necessarily, but when a vendor says it's inefficient, it could be due to honesty or trying to upsell, or something else I haven't considered. I'd guess that someone here has had my burner at some point, and was just curious about their experiences with it versus other burners.

-Aaron

Aron,

What is the boil off rate during your boil. You need to be between 10 and 15% per hour. I can easily get this with a very low flame on my turkey fryer burner. I also put the lid on when I heat water or wort. This saves energy. You also want to brew sheltered from wind. Since I did all this I can get about 5-6 5.5 gal AG batches out of one propane tank.

Kai

If the flame is nearly all blue, the propane is being burned efficiently. A 65,000 BTU burner can produce a rolling boil with 10-12 gallon batches. Larger burners merely get you to the boil point faster and if too large, waste energy because it can't transfer though the pot fast enough or much of the heat just flows up the sides of the pot.

With larger burners, you have to throttle back more to maintain your boil without boil-over, but the actual burn rate is probably the same as a smaller capacity burner wide open.

Kai,

Thanks, that's the info I wanted. On my first/last (I've only done one) AG batch, I got about a 27% boil-off, but that's including a boil-over, so I'll have to wait until next time and watch it a bit more carefully to see what the rate actually is. I'm sure I could have turned down the burner even more and kept the boil going as well, but I'm just getting started in this, having only made 3 extract batches and the one AG batch.

G. Fix and other authors suggest that the thermal loading on the wort is to high if you get significantly more than 15% boil-off/hr. Such a high thermal loading can lead to a burnt flavor in the beer. Obviously I don't expect that you can detect the flavor in any beer with a large amount of roasted malts.
Less than 10% is not enough to drive off DMS in a conventional brew-kettle set-up as we all use it.

Kai