Cleaning Beer Lines with Flow Meters

[interalia]

I've had a 6 tap keezer with RaspberryPints w/Swiss flow meters set up for about 8 months working perfectly thanks to all the advice in the forums. After kicking a couple of kegs, I cleaned the two beer lines.

I daisy chained the lines to clean the lines in serial using a 1 gallon hand pump filled with BLC run through several times followed by warm water and Saniclean After hooking up new kegs, the flow meter on the line I ran flow backwards through is no longer registering pulses. No issue with the other line.

Anyone had this issue from running fluids backward through a Swiss flow meter? Searched the forums and looked at the Swiss flow site. Nothing indicates you will damage a flow meter by running flow backward at low pressure/flow rates.

 

[day_trippr]

Kinda surprised by this. I've been running a six pack of SF800s since the v2.01 kit with flow meter support was released - years ago now - and have had no issues. I clean my lines (and meters) with a pumped parallel rig using BLC or LLC (whichever I was able to buy).

I haven't run cleaner backwards but I find it hard to believe it would matter. And I'm sure I blew through a meter backwards at some point when testing my original setup - and you can spin the rotor waaay faster blowing through it vs running an ounce per second or less of fluid through - and didn't break it.

If I had a meter suddenly quit the first thing I'd look at is the integrity of the ribbon cable where it enters the meter body. That's a high stress situation and you wouldn't be the first person to have a meter die because of wire fatigue in that spot. It's an obvious enough issue that I tie-wrapped my leads back to the JG fitting on the input end so they never wiggle at that shear point...

Cheers!

 

[duncan.brown]

Adding a data point to a zombie thread incase anyone else searches as I just did: I (accidentally) ran all five of my SF800s backwards while cleaning my kegerator. At least 2 liters BLC went through each SF800 pushed by 15 psi of pressure, followed by 500 ml of StarSan. Both in the wrong direction. All five SF800s are working fine afterwards.