Dishwasher bottle cleaner, part 1

Hi,

Do not know if you are all doing this, but anyway, I wanted to use an old dishwasher as a bottle/keg cleaner,....

The tray:


The tube inside the bottles:


The machine:


The cleaned bottle:



This was only a test run with 12 very mouldy bottles. I want to scale it up to 20 bottles, or two kegs.

The test went very well, had the bottles been rinsed after use, they would have now been ready to use. But since they were very mouldy, they could do with a mechanical cleaning and another run.

For the next test I will reduce the lenght of the narrow tubes, and maybe restrict the opening to create a more powerfull jet.

Lesson learned: DO NOT use your kitchen dishwasher for experimentation. For my first test, I blocked one of the caroussels, as I though it would increase the pressure of the other,... it didn't,.... it restricted the water intake and exposed the heating elements which in turn went bright red !

cheers,
walther

Another fine example that a dishwasher doesn't wash the inside of bottles...

A normal one, obviously does not,....
This one does !

cheers,
walther

walther said:

A normal one, obviously does not,....
This one does !

cheers,
walther

Click to expand...

I seriously doubt the capability of a dishwasher to completely wash out the slugs and such in bottles...but maybe that's just me...

I'll just stick with using a bottle brush as a drill bit and doing each one by hand/drill.

The 12 bottles I used, I got from a friend who does not brew himself, so the bottles were not rinsed after use. They all had a layer of mould on the bottom several millimeters thick, so you could not see through the bottom. Some also had mould on the sides from lying down.
After the wash they were all very clean, but in some of the bottles I could see small hints of dirt or mould.

Had the bottles been without too much mould, they would have been ready for brew now, and I would have used _much_ less water and time

Cheers,
walther

okay'' i had thoughts on doing something like this but i'm a known procrastinator. how did you set up the tubing into the bottles? can you make the pics bigger than thumbnail size?

edit: i would cut the length of the tubes to only go up say 1/2 into a bottle, what size is the tubing? and is that an apartment sized unit?

You should be able to click on the thumbnails, otherwise you can see the pictures in my gallery,... I think ?

The tubing is 25mm and 5mm.
The dishwasher is a standard unit 60x50x80cm
The 5mm tubes are fixed to the trays pegs (half of them bent down).

The 5mm tubes are just mechanically fitted into the larger distribution tube. I'm thinking of switching to JohnGuest, as the PVC turned milky white after heat exposure.


cheers,
walther