Hello,
I recently moved from sea level to 7000ish feet and instead of dealing with mild winters and hot summers I'm dealing with cold and fairly long winters and milder summers. The setup I've been using was all propane based - I have a 30 gallon HLT, 45 gallon MT and BK. I have the MT and HLT automated via low pressure controllers and the BK just used a high pressure cast iron burner. This worked great. But now I'd like to move the setup into my garage which is a conditioned environment during the cold months (via a ceiling mounted heater.) The challenge this poses is obviously I don't want to use propane in a closed space like that and I don't want to bring in cold air either (because cold air - is COLD.) I can't go entirely Natural Gas because my drop isn't going to be able to supply enough BTU's for multiple burners running simultaneously.
So my thought has been to add a RIMS tube externally to the MT and HLT and then just go NG on the BK. My question is: for batches that might be 30 or 40lbs of grain and sized for say 25-30 gallons net will a RIMS tube really be able to step mash and get up to mash out temps? What I don't want to do is waste time and money on this and it not work. If I need to add elements directly in the kettles it's not ideal but I'd rather just do that first.
Or any other ideas are completely welcome!
Thanks.
I recently moved from sea level to 7000ish feet and instead of dealing with mild winters and hot summers I'm dealing with cold and fairly long winters and milder summers. The setup I've been using was all propane based - I have a 30 gallon HLT, 45 gallon MT and BK. I have the MT and HLT automated via low pressure controllers and the BK just used a high pressure cast iron burner. This worked great. But now I'd like to move the setup into my garage which is a conditioned environment during the cold months (via a ceiling mounted heater.) The challenge this poses is obviously I don't want to use propane in a closed space like that and I don't want to bring in cold air either (because cold air - is COLD.) I can't go entirely Natural Gas because my drop isn't going to be able to supply enough BTU's for multiple burners running simultaneously.
So my thought has been to add a RIMS tube externally to the MT and HLT and then just go NG on the BK. My question is: for batches that might be 30 or 40lbs of grain and sized for say 25-30 gallons net will a RIMS tube really be able to step mash and get up to mash out temps? What I don't want to do is waste time and money on this and it not work. If I need to add elements directly in the kettles it's not ideal but I'd rather just do that first.
Or any other ideas are completely welcome!
Thanks.
