Testing my keggle's new ball valve and pickup tube operation and I can't get it to drain much below the valve body. On the outlet I first tried with a 90 degree copper fitting and short piece of tubing that extended just below the keg bottom. Keggle is up on a counter draining into a bucket on the floor. Only drained to the valve body. Added a hose to the downspout and ran the hose into the bucket and even submerged and it drained to a littllel below the valve body and stopped. I do see that the flow coming out the outlet tube is not the entire volume of the tube. (Hope I explained that right. The water coming the tube is only taking up about 1/2 the insider diameter of the tube.) Not sure if that is preventing a siphon effect and if so, how to fix it. Any help would be appreciated. I was hoping to brew my second batch using this new keggle drain and DIY hopstopper screen filter.
Keggle pickup tube problem
- Thread starter rgray58
- Start date
Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:
Damn, probably posted too soon. Noticed that the outlet copper tubing was larger diameter than the pickup tube in the keggle, which was hidden inside the hopstopper. Installed the original SS barb fitting and the outlet flow fills the inside diameter of the barb fitting. Headed to Lowe's to get a piece of tubing that fits the barb and a reducer fitting for the copper tubing so I can experiment to see which works better.
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2006
- Messages
- 16,779
- Reaction score
- 5,895
Without pictures its hard to tell if this is worthy advice.
There should be inner keggle pick up tube. It will be below the ball valve. The discharge should terminate below the inner pick up start point. To commence siphoning, the fluid level should be above the ball valve.
That's it. Also, keep in mind if you kill the siphon after the liquid level drops below the ball valve you can't restart it again.
There should be inner keggle pick up tube. It will be below the ball valve. The discharge should terminate below the inner pick up start point. To commence siphoning, the fluid level should be above the ball valve.
That's it. Also, keep in mind if you kill the siphon after the liquid level drops below the ball valve you can't restart it again.
Yep, the problem was that the external drain tube had a larger internal diamter than the pickup tube inside the keggle, which apparently prevented a good siphon. (Some fluid dynamics expert could probably explain why.) All I did was add a 1/2" to 1/4" reducer fitting to the end of the drain tube and everything worked as it should and the keggle drained to the absolute lowest it could. Simple fix for a stupid problem. Hopefully this thread may warn others.
