I received my Grainfather this week. Solid piece of equipment although the safety mechanism for the valve creates a frustrating problem. Did the first brew today,
Abbey Dubbel with 14 lbs of grain, heating the water for the mash was reasonably quick. It took about 30 mins to get from 75 to 120 degrees and about 20 to get from 120 to 156. Took less than 30 minutes to get from 168 to boil. Just remember to keep the heating element on "normal" when heating between mash steps. The pump worked great during the mash but failed within 1 minute after the boil when using the chiller to recirculate. I had to scrape the filter blindly and it finally got knocked off. I think the problem was actually a clog in the safety mechanism just below the ball valve. The spring below the ball was solidly clogged with hops. I removed these 2 pieces and wort began to flow fine. Just hope I didn't infect it with all the messing around. This clog issue seems to be commonly reported in other threads. I used only 1 7/8 oz of pellet hops in the boil (plus 1 oz in a bag for the 15 min addition ).
The chiller is phenomenal though once you get it going, wort in the 70's going straight into the fermenter. I used my immersion chiller in a bucket of ice water as a prechiller with the ground water here in FL being in the 80's. The wort coming out of the chiller will be cooler if you slow the flow by partly closing the valve on the Grainfather.
It appears from other message boards that on previous versions (or in other countries?) there was instead a cap you had to manually put over the end of the valve to protect yourself from pumping hot wort out into the air and onto your skin. Clearly this is an attempt by the manufacturer to idiot-proof the protection. However, it only took 30 minutes for this particular idiot to figure out how to remove it!