Activity level for .5micron Oxygen System

I just stepped up to an oxygenating kit and have a quick question for those who use one. I got the .5 micron stone from AHS, and of course I had to put it in a glass of water to see the pretty bubbles. The question is how many I should expect. It doesn't look like it is doing much. I feel like a dork asking "where are mah bubbles!?" but where are my bubbles? There is activity, just not as much as I would have thought. The bubbles form on the stone and gradually bubble up through the glass but at a very casual rate. I'm having a hard time believing that 60 seconds of this very gentle activity is going to put 10ppm of oxygen in my beer.

Is this normal? Or is the bubbling usually more vigorous?

The regulator seems to only work at the last quarter turn of its travel. Is this normal as well or could it contribute to slow bubbling? Without the stone the hose puts out what seems to be quite a bit of O2, but I'm new to this level of beer geekdom and don't know quite what to expect.

Thanks!
Chad

I have the O2 system from William's Brewing, which uses a 2 micron stone I think.

If so, the pores on my stone are 4x the size of yours, but mine will bubble pretty fiercely and foam up the top of the wort if I open the regulator all the way.

I don't open the regulator all the way because that seems like a waste of O2. I open it just enough so I see bubbles coming out.

Long story short, I am sure your stone will work well for oxygenating your wort. I've noticed an improvement in the quality of my fermentations since I started using mine. Its also really nice to have around for oxygenating big beers and mead.

If you can see the bubbles, they're not going into solution. Ideally, you could turn the regulator up until you see bubbles, then back it off until they disappear. However, that seems like a good way to accidentally turn the flow off completely. I usually turn mine up till I can just start to see bubbling.

Beerthoven said:

I have the O2 system from William's Brewing, which uses a 2 micron stone I think.

If so, the pores on my stone are 4x the size of yours, but mine will bubble pretty fiercely and foam up the top of the wort if I open the regulator all the way.

I don't open the regulator all the way because that seems like a waste of O2. I open it just enough so I see bubbles coming out.

Long story short, I am sure your stone will work well for oxygenating your wort. I've noticed an improvement in the quality of my fermentations since I started using mine. Its also really nice to have around for oxygenating big beers and mead.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reassurance. I appreciate it. We need to have another brew day soon so you and our fellow GRABASSers can see this thing in action and determine if it's doing what it should be doing.

Chad

Yuri_Rage said:

If you can see the bubbles, they're not going into solution. Ideally, you could turn the regulator up until you see bubbles, then back it off until they disappear. However, that seems like a good way to accidentally turn the flow off completely. I usually turn mine up till I can just start to see bubbling.

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Yuri, are you saying that my expectation of vigorous bubbling is not only wrong but counterproductive? That would actually be pretty good news.

As for backing off the regulator, there is so little room between all the way on and completely off (all happening at the last quarter turn) that I'd probably shut the thing down and get no oxygen into the wort. That would suck a lot.

Chad

Is your regulator sitting all the way down on the o2 bottle?

RegionalChaos said:

Is your regulator sitting all the way down on the o2 bottle?

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Yup, I've got it tightened down as far as it will go.

Chad

I get the feeling Yuri may have been referring to seeing bubbles breaking the surface of a carboy full of wort. You definitely should see bubbles coming out of the stone if it's in a small glass of water though. Mine bubbles pretty furiously, making quite a cloud of very fine bubbles.

A picture is worth a thousand words, you should take a picture of your system in use in some water. To me, from your description, it does NOT sound right.

Edit: You know, I was just thinking how my starsan needed some more oxygen... This is mine at full tilt. I usually crank it all the way up and then back it off a bit until I don't see a huge amount breaking the surface in the carboy. With that said, I bought this kit secondhand so I can't be completely sure whether it's a .5 micron or 2 micron stone. Regardless, a complete lack of visible vigorous bubbling would worry me.

If you want repeatable results invest in a acrylic flowmeter from dwyer and set flow rate to .5 CFH and duration to 3 minutes for 6 gallon batch. With this flow rate and time i get rated attenuation with the ready to pitch yeast vials from white labs and wyeast without making a starter for ales.

Dunno what happened but everything seems to be fine now. I don't know if the airstone had stage fright yesterday, if I hadn't torqued the regulator down hard enough on the oxygen tank or if the whole system just didn't want to look like a loser on HBT. Whatever the reason, when I went to shoot a sample of the gentle, almost non-existent bubbling I got yesterday, this is what resulted. This is definitely more what I had in mind.

Photo cropped and sharpened to show all the hot bubble action. :rockin:

Chad

kladue said:

If you want repeatable results invest in a acrylic flowmeter from dwyer and set flow rate to .5 CFH and duration to 3 minutes for 6 gallon batch. With this flow rate and time i get rated attenuation with the ready to pitch yeast vials from white labs and wyeast without making a starter for ales.

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Thanks, kladue, this is good information.

http://www.labsafety.com/store/Facilities_Maintenance/Instrumentation/Process_Flow/41707/

Seem to be available directly from dwyer for a little over $30... still rather expensive in my book, but may be well worth it for those of you who do a ton of brewing.
http://www.dwyer-inst.com/htdocs/flow/SeriesVFA-VFBPrice.cfm#CRA

Chad said:

Dunno what happened but everything seems to be fine now. I don't know if the airstone had stage fright yesterday, if I hadn't torqued the regulator down hard enough on the oxygen tank or if the whole system just didn't want to look like a loser on HBT. Whatever the reason, when I went to shoot a sample of the gentle, almost non-existent bubbling I got yesterday, this is what resulted. This is definitely more what I had in mind.

Photo cropped and sharpened to show all the hot bubble action. :rockin:

Chad

Click to expand...

Chad,

I purchased my O2 kit from NB(.5 micron), and from your FIRST description, that is what mine is like. When I tried mine in water, mine DID NOT look like you second pic at all . I had very little bubble action, I boiled it and used it anyway on my First All Grain (Irish Red). I had blow off from the primary in like 16 hours, so fermentation was good?

Now I want to go home and test again in water to see if maybe the boiling maybe cleaned it up or something?

-Craig

The shot I took earlier was the airstone in a growler of StarSan. On a hunch I just went and tried again in a glass of water. It is definitely more dramatic in StarSan, probably because it tends to foam anyway. It was less impressive in the glass of water, but still better than I observed yesterday. I also noticed that it took a moment or two to really take off. I suspect that the .5 micron stone is so fine that pressure has to build up before the oxygen flow through the stone reaches its peak.

Chad