New Gadget - Airlock

[neon0107]

Hello All,

New home brewer here and having a lot of fun so far (and spending a lot of money. lol ) I am a geek with stats and stuff so love looking at numbers and was intrigued when I came across Tilt which lets you see your gravity numbers in real time. I was thinking about picking one up. I cam across this today and now interested, not sure if I should wait or not. Has anyone else seen this and what are your thoughts on it?

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/plaato-reinventing-the-airlock-technology--2#/

 

[mredge73]

I do think it is a neat gizmo, but not $150 neat.
I would feel silly putting a $150 piece of tech on a $5 bucket for no real reason but to log how fast it ferments.
It also has the same old design faults of a 3 piece airlock including the problem with suckback during a temperature change.
I wonder what happens when it gets full of krausen?

Overall I think it would be a fun engineering project to be involved in, however it isn't a good product at it's current price point.
It really needs to be marketed to people with lots of SS and disposable income. Something that will work off of a blow off tube or TC connection.
They also should sell a couple of [thread=632181]Krausen Catchers[/thread] with it, if you Krausen it up you will need to remove it and clean it loosing/messing up all your fermentation data.

 

[dyqik]

There's already a thread on this in the Crowdfunding section.

My opinion is to stay well away from this product, as there is no way of using it if the parent company stops supporting it, or goes bust, as you can only get data off it via their servers. Just like Beerbug did with a similar product.

 

[mredge73]

There's already a thread on this in the Crowdfunding section.

My opinion is to stay well away from this product, as there is no way of using it if the parent company stops supporting it, or goes bust, as you can only get data off it via their servers. Just like Beerbug did with a similar product.

Yikes! I thought it may have worked like the BCS.
I would expect this company to fail to launch, there are too many obvious flaws with it and it is way to niche.

 

[neon0107]

Thanks for the info and thoughts. I agree, will stay away and put the money into a good kettle I am saving for.

Yes, saw the other post after I submitted mine. Did not know there was a crowdfunding section until it got moved there. Still working my way through this forum and seeing all there is to learn from.

 

[bernardsmith]

But what is this? A CO2 detector /sensor and a calculator to determine how much ethanol must be present for the amount of CO2 detected? Is there not a far less inexpensive way to measure the amount of CO2 being produced? I would love to build a device that would tell me when my meads have reached say 6% ABV...

 

[dryboroughbrewing]

Sure you could get a co2 calibrated MAF sensor on eBay, mate it to your gas outflow and do the math based on those readings. I actually have one that I've played with a bit that emits readings via a serial port... I think it cost me between 5 and 10 bucks. I love old industrial surplus.

 

[bucketnative]

Sure you could get a co2 calibrated MAF sensor on eBay, mate it to your gas outflow and do the math based on those readings. I actually have one that I've played with a bit that emits readings via a serial port... I think it cost me between 5 and 10 bucks. I love old industrial surplus.

Yes, and everything assumes that you have a perfect seal on your fermenter, which as we know is not always the case, particularly with buckets.

 

[bernardsmith]

Yes, and everything assumes that you have a perfect seal on your fermenter, which as we know is not always the case, particularly with buckets.

Doesn't have to be "perfect", merely "good enough" and if you can calibrate what the sensor detects with the actual gravity then you will account for any CO2 escaping without detection.

 

[Jwin]

Reminds me of the Speidel Garspundmobil
https://shop.speidels-braumeister.de/en/accessories/fermenting/gaerspundmobil
I don't think speidel is going belly up anytime soon. Probably a safer bet.

 

[dyqik]

Reminds me of the Speidel Garspundmobil
https://shop.speidels-braumeister.de/en/accessories/fermenting/gaerspundmobil
I don't think speidel is going belly up anytime soon. Probably a safer bet.

I'm not sure if that only talks the MySpeidel system, or if you can talk to it directly. The fact that it has USB as well as WiFi makes me more hopeful that you could talk to it directly, but the USB is probably just be for power. There does seem to be enough access to the device that you can configure how it connects to the MySpeidel servers, so there's hope that you could reverse engineer that to get the data locally.

You aren't just at risk of Speidel going under, but also of them withdrawing the service and/or stopping supporting and maintaining it.

 

[AF1HomeBrew]

Reminds me of the failed BrewNanny on Kickstarter. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lyonslabs/brewnanny-home-brew-monitor/description