Some great milestones (and setbacks) encountered this weekend. I was able to test out my burners on Sunday! The HLT burner was working great, there is less airflow around my boil kettle burner stand design so that was burning super fuel rich. I did a bit of reading online about troubleshooting these wok burners, i'm going to try removing some of the burner tips and play around with lifting the kettle a bit off the stand to increase airflow and see if either of those work to get a nice blue flame with a good range of control.
The setback: Saturday night I turned on the water to the room and was testing out the flow I have which will dump right into the HLT with a 5 gallon bucket. Worked great! I then shut the upper 'fill valve' while the supply shutoff inside the cabinet was still on, putting all the water pressure on the silicone tubing I had used for the flexible connections. I was leaving the room to walk back to my shop and grab a beer, just as I was closing the door I heard a weird noise that sounded like a balloon being blown up and then a huge gushing sound as water leaked out of the cabinet! I quickly shut off the water at the main coming into the room inside the cabinet but 2-3 gallons of water had already spilled all over the cabinet at the left side wall there. I realize now I was stupid not to think about that problem sooner, I've been using silicone tubing to my RV water filter for years for my brewing water, but in my back workshop I just hook it up the hose bib in there and just flow water a little bit, the tubing never sees any pressure and it has worked for years. I just didn't think about the need to change materials with my new setup. So half of Sunday was spent re-doing those water lines with braided PVC plastic lines rated to 200psi. You can see a photo below of how stretched that nice silicone tubing got before it burst. Either way I thank my lucky stars that it didn't happen when I was back getting a beer and I came back to the room to see 20-50 gallons of water everywhere. I have a little floor drain I put in just for this reason, but it's not plumbed to the outside yet, all the stuff in my storage space under this room would have been a mess! Getting that plumbed in will be a top priority once i'm brew-ready in this room.
Here is the improved version of the HLT water. I even rigged up a little way for the water to better drain out of that space between the cabinet and the wall if this were to happen again, you can see the little copper 90 which connects to some silicone tubing I caulked into a kind of drain for that space.
I will say I was thanking my past self that I had the idea to plan for leaks with this cabinet build. I used trim screws for that window trim there, so I was able to easily remove that trim and then the cabinet top (once unscrewed from the base) was able to slide right over so I could clean up the leak in that area and let it dry out overnight.
For the fun stuff I took a couple of short videos of the water fill into the HLT working, as well as the burners on, but HBT is telling me they are too large to post, sorry I can't share those i'll take more photos next time.
Here is one of the new holes in my keggle, this one if for a thermometer on the HLT. Yes, I know it's low but I placed it so it will still be below the water level if i'm heating 3.25 gallons, which is my sparge amount for a 5 gallon batch. I just bought a bunch of heat shields from brewhardware for my kettles so i'm hoping this wont be an issue.
Lastly, I got one of the cabinet doors mounted, I think it looks really cool and the rustic lumber matches the window trim really well. I decided to mount the other door in a non-standard way, I'm going to try and just use some blocks on the inside of the door for alignment and then magnets to hold it on. I envisioned that door when open being in my way when brewing, so this way when I brew I could just pull the door off completely and set it in the far corner. We'll see if I can get that to work it will take some monkeying around. Also I'm going to put a pull-out drawer in the cabinet for small things like thermometers and silicone gloves, etc for brew day that you can access once the door is opened. I need to make that next as well.
I'll post the next update when I (hopefully) have my burner issue sorted on the boil kettle stand and when the cabinet is truly finished. At which point i'll probably be thinking about doing my first batch in here!
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