OneInTheHand
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- Oct 7, 2015
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Anybody tried it?
I was thinking the two ways would be either
- Actively vent the water vapor coming off the brew pot through the silica gel (for those that can't vent outside)
- Put a false lid on the top of the kettle and just led the beads sit on top.
They have color changing beads that are meant to be around food. A quick google search indicated the price point wouldn't be too high. Plus it looked like you could re-activate the silica gel by putting it in the oven later.
My rough math is for a 5 gallon batch : 1+ gallon of water will be boiled off. Which would be 8+ pounds of water. You'd need about 30lbs of silica gel. Which is a fair amount, but you could replace 10 pounds of it on top throughout the boil if you didn't have the head space. Guessing 30lb is about 4 gallons in volume. Initial cost would be more than the steam slayers. No water waste, but also would have energy waste when silica was re-activated.
Source for estimates:
https://moistureboss.com/orange-silica-gel/
https://www.sorbentsystems.com/desiccants_charts.html
I was thinking the two ways would be either
- Actively vent the water vapor coming off the brew pot through the silica gel (for those that can't vent outside)
- Put a false lid on the top of the kettle and just led the beads sit on top.
They have color changing beads that are meant to be around food. A quick google search indicated the price point wouldn't be too high. Plus it looked like you could re-activate the silica gel by putting it in the oven later.
My rough math is for a 5 gallon batch : 1+ gallon of water will be boiled off. Which would be 8+ pounds of water. You'd need about 30lbs of silica gel. Which is a fair amount, but you could replace 10 pounds of it on top throughout the boil if you didn't have the head space. Guessing 30lb is about 4 gallons in volume. Initial cost would be more than the steam slayers. No water waste, but also would have energy waste when silica was re-activated.
Source for estimates:
https://moistureboss.com/orange-silica-gel/
https://www.sorbentsystems.com/desiccants_charts.html