brewershardware jacketed coni+glycol ?'s

Oh yea, and I haven the tc leg extensions with sight tube... works great. Wish they did make a caster set of some sort

 

How is your solution returning to the bucket? Have you elevated the fermentor to get a bucket beneath the cone?

 

^^^ This. I originally built it for cleaning my corny kegs and my sanke kegs (fermenters), but with just a hose adapter, I now use it for the conicals.

 

Yes, they are top heavy, but you can mitigate that. If you look at my pic, you'll see that the frame is square, so it has 4 wheels, where the fermentor only has 3 legs. This alone adds a ton of stability to it. Additionally, you can see where I extended the front legs out in front of the fermentor a bit. This also adds a lot of stability. There are some screws holding the legs down. This was all supposed to be temporary while some SS frames were being made, but they may get a bit more longer term usage now.

 

Yes i have tc extensions and just slide a bucket under it so it drains through the cone.

 

Hs1149 Hey your conical looks great! I see you added an extra ferrule for a sampling valve to yours? How much extra was that? Also how much was shipping?...p.s I appologize for sending a pm first. I wanted to post here so that others could share the knowledge you have to offer. I plan on ordering one soon!

 

Shipping was $56 to 48230
I did not request the sampling port but it is nice to have. I believe it is now a standard feature on fermenter.

 

I'm looking to order soon as well... My plan is to have a 5 gallon bucket of coolant in a deep freeze (~-10*) figured circulating sub zero coolant cant hurt anything. And we can still use the freezer for some food.

 

So your temp controller is going to control the pump and not the cooling source?

 

Unless you are doing 5 gallon batches, this method won't keep up with the cooling requirements. A container of glycol sitting in the freezer will indeed get down to the temps you project, but once you start circulating it, it warms up fast and cannot recover quickly.

You should look to building a window AC unit and ice cooler setup. With the AC condenser coil directly submerged in the glycol, it can recover MUCH faster.

 

Damn thats a bummer, Is it a matter of the freezers compressor not keeping up or is it a problem of heat sinks transferring the heat out of the glycol? could have the returning glycol do a loop of the freezer before returning to the bucket... Infact, the bucket is only needed for rapid transitions like cooling wort as long as you can get good thermal transfer from the fridge?

I'm not opposed to making an air conditioner modle. But I was trying to cut down on my equipment floorprint. Can the Ac units cool to 32*? I was under the understanding that was below their ideal operating range.

 

It really is all going to depend on how many degrees you need to move your wort. Don't forget also the temp swing when you crash cool.

You could always try it your way first and see if it works for your setup. You would re-use almost all of the components anyways, so it wouldn't be like you sunk a bunch of costs into it that were going to be scrapped.

A good friend of mine did the freezer style unit for quite a while for his 5G batches, but once he moved up in size, it had a hard time keeping up. YMMV.

 

Fwiw, I have a ac unit type chiller and my temp is set at 25 degrees. My conical has 11 gallons of beer in it at 42 degrees right now waiting keg. It's works great. I can crash cool very quickly as well. I have a 9 gallon bath Glycol bath.

 

I wasn't able to get anything up and running for this brew. But I was able to drop the wort from 32c down to 18c and its holding at 20-21c for the past three days on 40 lbs of commercial ice and one frozen milk jug. I just added two more milk jugs today. Cold crashing will be another issue. But this is a wheat so i'm good for now.

My plan for the time being will be wait for winter and brew my 2 10 gallon batches when nature will help me with the freezing temps(bucket of glycol sitting outside).