I moved into the garage from the driveway this year with my 3 vessel system. I have an RO system attached to my brew stand and my brew rig sits on the opposite wall to the sink so I added a line to the brew rig wall and put a wye valve on the valve. One is for RO water and one is for the plate chiller. I don't have a working drain in the floor but it is sloped to an old cemented drain. In a way I am fortunate for that, as it least the water pools there. I thought I would gradually improve my workflow to account for being inside, being more careful and such.
Things I have learned:
0. Close all your valves at the beginning of brewing.
1. Make sure both your discharge hose and the supply hose are connected to your plate chiller when you turn the water on.
2. Garden hose disconnects don't like to be dropped when attached to a sprayer while the water is on. They will let you know this by disconnecting and watering the garage.
3. Those little inline valve handles on the wye like to be fully closed. Even if they look fully closed, if they aren't, they will piss all over the floor when you turn the main on for RO water.
4. If you collect your concentrate water for the garden or otherwise, don't put the container on the floor, even if you think it's a pretty big container and you'll be back to check on it.
5. A float valve on your RO collection device will not turn off the concentrate line.
6. Don't wear music buds while filling up your utility sink, there's no overflow drain.
7. Don't go check something in your keezer while filling up the utility sink. You might find some unusual ice and start to investigate. (see 6.)
8. No matter how tight you may properly fix that weeping fitting on your HLT, stick around until the RO water in the HLT reaches the fitting because the float valve may be 1/16" or so above the fitting.
9. There are many not so good ways to keep the wort out hose on your plate chiller output attached to the FV. [Extensive testing performed with and without inline oxygenation.]
10. Draining 6 gallons or so of spent PBW out of a keggle into a bucket can be done efficiently with multiple buckets by switching them out quickly and paying attention to the bucket as it fills up.
Top Finding
11. Just keep the mop and bucket nearby and mop up spills right away. Keep it half full of plain water for wort spills, reduces stickiness.
Back when I was a line cook, we had rubber mats on the kitchen line, not that they cared about our comfort, but rather to keep us from slipping. These were long rubber matts and looked like chain links, lots of holes in the mats. They would get really nasty by the end of the night. The overnight cleaning crew would hang them up and hose them down, there was a spray area built for it in fact. You won't want that checkerboard mat. I have a set of those and I would never put that on the floor by the brew rig. You want something you can pick up and hose off easily.
My next brew space absolutely gets a floor drain and then I could get a big squeegee.
