Overheating (up the sides) Issue

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surlytheduff

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Greetings,

I'm four brewing days into using a Bayou Classic KA-B4 burner and I'm having some issues with heat control. Specifically, I've got excessive heat coming up the sides of the pot.

My setup is 15 gallon generic pot for BIAB. Pot has two welded ports stacked one above the other, then one of Bobby's weldless sight glass kits. I've got a snap on heatshield attached to both the sight glass and the lower 3 piece ball valve.

This past Saturday was first day using pot post sight glass install (also first day doing BIAB). Right off the bat while heating up water I could tell that heat coming up side of pot was going to be problematic, even with the heat shields. I ended up using a bunch of tinfoil to help block heat from ball valve and sight glass, but they still got very hot. Had a number of boilovers out of sight glass tube. In hindsight, I think I should have skipped adding the sight glass (looks great though).

Any ideas how I can address this? It seems like I've got three options:
1) Fabricate an upper windshield out of aluminum flashing to focus heat under the pot
2) Modify burner stand to allow the burner face to get closer to the bottom of the pot. The default gap from burner to bottom of pot seems a bit excessive (around 4.25")
3) Get a different burner

TIA
 
i put a rectangle shaped piece of stainless steel underneath the pot between the burner and the pot and that takes care of the sight glass getting too hot. the shield came with my blichmann pot, i sold the pot but kept the shield. sounds like the snap on shield is not wide enough to be effective on your system.
 
Any chance your running your burner much higher then it needs to be to boil? I mean, are you trying to boil fast instead of just boil?

I have a blichman, so it's a similar burner and you really don't need to run them very high to maintain a boil, but I think people crank them up to try and heat faster. If you can see tons of heat waves going up the side of the pot, you're wasting a lot of heat that's not going to the bottom of your kettle.

If not, foil works pretty good. It's what I use on my sight glass brew kettle.
 
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