Some small HERMS questions

Hi,

I’ve been lurking around here for quite some time now and the level of creativity and knowledge here is truly inspiring :rockin:

I’m putting together a small electric HERMS, and I’ve got many good ideas from many different threads in this forum. However, I still have some questions and thoughts that I’ll be glad to get your answer or feedback on. First one is about easy to clean and sanitation of the system;

As HLT and MLT I’m using two 8 gallon stainless (1 mm thick walls = about 1/25 of an inch) kettles that I’ve bought of a fellow homebrewer. The ones I’ve got is already insolated with chimney insolation, with a sheet of aluminum wrapped around it. Great for keeping the temperature of the wort, but not easy to keep clean and sanitized…

So, can I remove the insolation and trust my PID to correct the temperature time or is it better to keep it on?

Best Regards

BeerMonkey


P.S. English is (as you probably already figured out from the text above) not my fist language, so if the grammar makes it difficult to understand or read pls. ask for clarification and I’ll do my best to clarify.

 

In my setup, I have a pid reading the HLT, and a pid reading the MLT, both auber pid's with rtd sensors. My MLT is not insulated, just stainless keggles. To give you a quick example, I brewed last Saturday, it was about 80-85 deg f in my garage, and my target mash temp was 152 f, so I started out with my HLT at 170, and my mash started out at 151, but within 7-10 minutes started to get warmer- 154-155, so I started lowering the HLT to lower the memo of the mash. I also have a pump continuously recirculating my HLT water along with another pump for the herms unit


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

 

Like most HERMS brewers, none of my kettles are insulated:



You'll lose a little bit of heat out the sides and top of the MLT and HLT but your heating element in the HLT will have no problems holding temperature.

Most HERMS brewers do it this way - no insulatation. The HLT doesn't need to be cleaned since it only ever touches water, so you *could* insulate it, but the cost savings in electricity is going to fairly minor.

Kal

P.S. Your English is very good. I always find it funny when someone apologizes that English isn't their first language as usually their grammar is much better than most of the posts you'll see from English first writers.

 

Thanks guys, it turned out great!