I've had the (possibly) good fortune to aquire one of these:
Hass Manufacturing Company Online Search Results
from a retiring photographer who had a pretty advanced lab/darkroom. I am thinking about building a HERMS based on this unit, which is basically a highly precise hot/cold water mixing valve. It works by sensing temp with a thermocouple and moving 2 valves with stepper motors to achieve a given temp. I need to find a way to mod the thing to give a more appropriate temp range.
Heres basically what I'm thinking of doing:
MLT manifold>>Pump>>T fitting with one side feeding 50' 1/2" copper heat exchanger inside electric heated HLT for a 'HOT' side and the other bypassing it for a 'COLD' side of the mixing valve. Mixing Valve outlet>>MLT return manifold.
Sorry for the text description, I'll draw somthing up and post it when I get home from work later.
Potential problems with this system I can see:
Modding the Intellifaucet controls to allow greater temp range (I may need to simply use the valves/steppers and a different controller)
Possibly overheating the small amount of wort trapped in the heat exchanger once the MLT is up to the desired rest temp. Not sure on this one, obviously the HLT would be at sparge temperature, and if the wort in the heat exchanger was trapped there for a while, it would be heated to sparge temp as well. How problematic would this be? It could obviously denature the enzymes in that small volume of the wort, but would this be enough to notice?
This is a potential future project, I'm currently building the MLT and HLT for normal manual mashing/fly sparging and will brew a few batches to get the system tweaked and working manually before attmpting to step up to a HERMS, but I may build the heat exchanger into the HLT and just not use it yet.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Don
Hass Manufacturing Company Online Search Results
from a retiring photographer who had a pretty advanced lab/darkroom. I am thinking about building a HERMS based on this unit, which is basically a highly precise hot/cold water mixing valve. It works by sensing temp with a thermocouple and moving 2 valves with stepper motors to achieve a given temp. I need to find a way to mod the thing to give a more appropriate temp range.
Heres basically what I'm thinking of doing:
MLT manifold>>Pump>>T fitting with one side feeding 50' 1/2" copper heat exchanger inside electric heated HLT for a 'HOT' side and the other bypassing it for a 'COLD' side of the mixing valve. Mixing Valve outlet>>MLT return manifold.
Sorry for the text description, I'll draw somthing up and post it when I get home from work later.
Potential problems with this system I can see:
Modding the Intellifaucet controls to allow greater temp range (I may need to simply use the valves/steppers and a different controller)
Possibly overheating the small amount of wort trapped in the heat exchanger once the MLT is up to the desired rest temp. Not sure on this one, obviously the HLT would be at sparge temperature, and if the wort in the heat exchanger was trapped there for a while, it would be heated to sparge temp as well. How problematic would this be? It could obviously denature the enzymes in that small volume of the wort, but would this be enough to notice?
This is a potential future project, I'm currently building the MLT and HLT for normal manual mashing/fly sparging and will brew a few batches to get the system tweaked and working manually before attmpting to step up to a HERMS, but I may build the heat exchanger into the HLT and just not use it yet.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Don