youve mentioned that before and I still have a hard time believing your mash tun is losing temp so quickly you need to recirculate at full speed.. unless your brewing in a cold windy location, have no top on the tun or stirring, somethings amiss.
long story short basically what I'm saying is I have had the same issues with my herms setup as you had with yours. Fortunately it was easy to correct by adjusting the grist to work with the system. Cheers
I would also compact my grain bed if I didn't adjust my grist correctly for my system. Hence the recommendation to mill looser when using a Herms in order to get the best *performance* rather than best effiency if thats what your going for. Because I specifically built my setup for temp control and not for better efficiency it works excellent for me. Cheers
my signature below?
Ha! Sorry. No signatures on the mobile version. I see it now. Thanks
I want to clarify something. You say that if you don't run wide open then you don't have the same temp between the HLT and Mash Tun. Does that mean that if you run a bit slower your mash progressively loses temp? As in, it'll drop a couple degrees below the HLT after a few minutes but after 20 min it's like 10 degrees or more off, and more than that after 40 min?
You are correct that the mash would run appx 3-5 degrees cooler than my MLT if I restrict the flow thru my Herms which could easily be compensated for. It also causes a few biggerr issues however. The ramp speeds will be VERY slow and the biggest issue for me personally is I like to not monitor the mash. If I mill tighter then I have to reduce the flow significantly otherwise I'll compact the grain bed and I have to sit around babysitting the pump. Milling looser to allow good flow means I can dough in and head out for errands etc.
Yeah, I've been doing 10G batches (11.5 into fermentor) for the last few years on a Kal Clone type system. I can't remember what I set my mill gap to because it was a few years ago, but I also run my pump wide open. I don't just go full open though, I gradually open the valve over a few minutes. Even with that I'm 2F different from my HLT to the Mash. I use a good amount of rice hulls and they help quite a bit. Haven't had a stuck mash in recent memory and I don't really have to babysit it. My efficiency took a small hit going to the Kal Clone, from a consistent 83% to 78%.
Sounds like we're both doing the same thing with the same setup. I'm confused now though as why you mentioned that I'm not gaining anything running the system as designed? What's your reasoning for running yours wide open if it makes no difference? Cheers
I wouldn't want to widen my gap much more and give up additional efficiency. If I had trouble running wide open I'd just slow the flow a bit.
Same here. My mills set at about .045 and I condition everytime and mill slowly. If you also run yours at full speed your mill must be set near mine as I've never read of anyone having good results on a Herms with a fine grist. I've also noticed that people without first hand experience on a Herms setup just can't accept it. Possibly thats because with a rims I imagine you can heat the mash thru the element higher than the actual desired mash temp therefore slower works but that can't be done on a Herms without overshooting the temp and that can be a pain to correct so you need to turn the liquid over faster to compensate? Who knows. All I know is on the Kal clone it's the only way to use it as designed and it works perfectly. Cheers
Your reply makes me think my wording may have been poor. What I meant was on a herms system your hlt can't really be set higher than your desired mlt temp as there's no real way to stop the heating without stopping recirculation. I was imagining that using a rims set-up you could set the actual rims temp higher than your desired mlt temp to give you better heating performance and still not overshooting without needing to turn the mash liquid over as frequently like you do on a Herms. Hopefully that makes sense. Cheers
but thats not how it normally works. normally it takes more than a couple minutes for a mashtun to drop in temp and if your recirculating at even 1.5gpm as I sometimes do with my thin walled bayou classic mashtun I still maintain the 1 degree max temp differenctial between the wort leaving my rims and the wort leaving my mash tun. and even than my pid shows a max power level of 25% to maintain a temp once its reached even at that slow flow speed. there shouldnt be a large temp differential on a properly setup rims or herms, the norm is 1 to 2 degrees. the fact that you have to recirculate at such a high speed just to maintain the same temp is what I just dont understand. if your step mashing , yes more flow with more heating power is beneficial as long as your grain is course evough or your grainbed is large enough to support that flow without the usual channeling and efficiency loss we built these systems to avoid. I mean seriously If you have to crush so course your only getting 75% efficiency and do additional steps like conditioning your grain then why not just use a cooler and not recirculate at that point and get better results? Where is the actual benefit here? Maybe Im missing something here but its just the way I see it. slower flow through a rims or herms should not increase the ouput over the setpoint, if it does your not doing it the way its intended to work. Your herms coil and flow should allow enough time on one pass for the temps to equalize with what the water in the HLT is. I have seen some people just randomy try to maintain a consistent on the fly offset and that is not as reliable.
if there was a clear cut and dry answer to satisfy everyone there would be one less thing to discuss here. it will always be an active topic like ford vs chevy...This whole thing has been argued ad-nauseum for years and never has there been a clear answer
RIM's, HERMS, BIAB, Extract on wifey's stove, turkey fryer's, solar, wood burning, and any other way you can think of... All have pro's and con's and all brew perfectly good beers. Learn your system. Follow good practices and processes. Master your skills and equipment. Drink and enjoy your efforts! You're welcome.
Sorry but honestly I'm not sure how to explain this any better and i don't mean that to be a smartass either. My writing isn't the best in text. I think we have different reasons we went with our systems. I wanted better temp control, repeatability, and most importantly to be able to brew indoors. I don't care at all about efficiency. As a matter of fact I don't even remember what mine is exactly. If your interested check out kals site for a better explanation as to why the full speed is required. Theres 100s of people on there using the system exactly as I am with great results. Brooklyn brewery uses one as I pilot system too if I remember correctly. Fortunately one of the founders of my old brew club is also the owner/head brewer of the largest most popular craft brewery in my city. He once gave out the recipe of a very popular beer they make for the member's to clone for a competition and I won. He said it was spot on in his opinion. My point is the system works great as do most Kal clones. My recipes aren't always the best but my beers don't have any technical faults. Cheers and I'm out of this one.
This is an old thread and I hesitated to continue it but your math is off. Running two elements in series doubles the resistance. You don't mention what the rated wattage was so who knows what the actual resistance is. Let's say they are 1500 watt at 120v (12.5 amps of current). Those would be 9.6 ohms each. In series that's 19.2 ohms. Run that on 240v and you get 3000 watts (12.5 amps of current again). So, you could just run each of those elements on their own 120v circuits and get 3000 total watts. You can run them in series on 240v and get the same 3000 watts. In no configuration do you get 5 times the power. Even if you ran them in parallel to achieve 4.8 ohms, you'd make 12,000 watts at 50amp and likely burn the elements pretty quickly since they are not rated for that kind of current. If you did that it's 4x the power.
I know I'm coming late to this thread and haven't read all of the trails that the posts have mentioned but I have seen a video by Kai where he mentions operating the HERMS pump at full bore.
To my knowledge and experience with both rims and multiple herms systems, if your running a 5-7gpm mash pump at full bore with a 16" or smaller diameter false bottom you going to be compacting (or "pulling down" as they call it on probrewer) your grain bed and in most cases you will hurt your efficiency and possibly temp consistency due to the channeling that results.
