Digital Floating Hydrometers and Airlocks, How Accurate Are These?

[blitzballer2201]

Hello,

I was looking at some ways to measure gravity during fermentation, I see there are a TON of floating hydrometer options out there now, most prominent is the TILT hydrometer.

I also see there are airlocks that measure (bubbles per minute) and correlate that to a OG reading, most prominent is the Plaato air lock. I see issues with both.

TILT is based on a gyroscope, it just measures the angle and that shows the gravity, sounds legit but if there is anything that interferes with the tilt then your reading is going to be off, dry hopping, krausen, active yeast, sides of fermenters, etc...

Smart Airlocks that measure bubbles per minute, if the calculation can be accurate then I can see this being the superior option since there is less that can interfere with the sensor, also does not need to touch the beer. BUT - I have a hard time thinking there can be an accurate reading based on just counting bubbles from the airlock.

What are your experience with these two different types of hydrometers? How accurate are these?

 

[Elric]

counting bubbles equally has it's own flaws or items that would need to be clearly addressed. It's very easy to not have a tight seal and have gas leaking from other parts of fermenter and completely negate the device. it would also have no ability to provide any data during the time it takes to fill the fermenter headspace with enough gas to actually start to push some out of the fermenter, and since this amount of headspace would vary each brew how can it compensate for this? Finally temperature variations can cause gas to come out of solution, how would these not throw off the readings?
In using either product I think the important thing would be to use it not to get super accurate gravity readings, but to be able to graph a trend to help determine when fermentation is finished and then take a sample of beer to get an accurate FG reading with an alternate measurement device. When looking at it that way, I don't see a bubble counter really being any more accurate than period just looking at the bubbler to see what type of activity it shows.