Ss Brewtech eBrewing

[McKnuckle]

I imagine that the difference is related to the density of wort/mash vs. plain water. It should theoretically take more time to heat an equivalent volume of mash, which would affect the PID’s settings.

 

[augiedoggy]

Enlighten me as to the why here.
The only thing it gets info from is the temp probe which is immersed in water. I mean grain too, but how could it possibly know that? It only reads temps.
maybe I'll do it with water and then do it again at the end of mashing next brew?

the pid has to "learn" the correct algorithm and that done by setting up the task at hand and performing the autotune where it adusts and "programs" itself to know preemptively when to shut off and turn on the element and at which levels to climb to and maintain temps without overshooting the amount of power and time it takes for the liquid to climb to temp completely depends on the amount of water and the thermal load (IE grains drawing temps from that water) so all these conditions ideally should be the same as in a real application run when tuning... This is the difference between PID tech and hysteresis like a home thermostat uses. you can research it and find some manual pid settings you can use which will work ok without tuning for this application but as you have found the generic out of the box settings are too far out of the ballpark for what you need currently.

 

[NewJersey]

I did it with water today and it's now working perfectly. With just water anyways.
I'm gonna take your advice and tune it again with spent grain and water after my next brew.

 

[BrewGinner]

I did it with water today and it's now working perfectly. With just water anyways.
I'm gonna take your advice and tune it again with spent grain and water after my next brew.

What exactly did you do @NewJersey? I've looked at the post on the FaceBook user group, but the instructions seems somewhat vague.

 

[Erik Rodriguez]

I used to brew with gas, but found it difficult to maintain temperature with any accuracy, which resulted in significant variance in my brews. So, I did a lot of looking around at other systems. Finally decided that the "K-Rims" system Blichmann makes (Breweasy) was excellent for my needs. Fairly compact space and lots of volume. Then, looking at my current equipment, I decided that with minimal investment, some creativity, cutting holes, and a bit of luck, I could convert my equipment to mimic a breweasy at a fraction of the cost.


It took me about a year of gathering parts, selecting a controller, building the controller, so on, so forth, dragging my heels and whatever, but eventually got it built. All connections are now quick disconnects. Went through several iterations of leak testing and fixing, but finally did my first brew on it a week ago.


Worked beautifully! Maintained temp within a degree. OG ended up higher than expected, which means I need to fine tune my profile in BeerSmith.


Anyway, here is a pic of it in process (Ignore the other random crap). Not much to see really. But I decided to have the flow go into the hops hopper just to reduce spash. It was a small 5gal test batch of Irish Red. The system can brew 10 gallons with plenty of spare room.


10 gal and 18 gal from Bayou Classic (Amazon)

Quick connects, hopper, tubing, and pretty much everything else from Amazon. Some from NorthernBrewer.

Control panel is a 30a BIAB from EBrewSupply.

 

[NewJersey]

That's a lot of weldless and not right there

 

[NewJersey]

What exactly did you do @NewJersey? I've looked at the post on the FaceBook user group, but the instructions seems somewhat vague.

I did steps 1, 2, & 3.
Then I hit the menu button til AT showed up. Set it to AT1.
It then did the auto tune

 

[NewJersey]

Once you're in front of the thing with your phone open it's actually pretty easy

 

[BrewGinner]

Once you're in front of the thing with your phone open it's actually pretty easy

Thank you sir!

 

[NewJersey]

Thank you sir!

You do it too?

 

[BrewGinner]

You do it too?

Haven’t yet but I’m going to. If I can’t get to it this week, I’ll give it a go this weekend.

One other question for you. Did you set your mash temp as normal when you did the water test, and then run the auto tune? Do you need to wait until you hit the set temp, or can you do it at any point during the heating cycle?

 

[NewJersey]

Haven’t yet but I’m going to. If I can’t get to it this week, I’ll give it a go this weekend.

One other question for you. Did you set your mash temp as normal when you did the water test, and then run the auto tune? Do you need to wait until you hit the set temp, or can you do it at any point during the heating cycle?

I had set my temp at 149 in auto more before running the autotune

 

[Maniacmcgoo]

Just received my 3v system will post photos as I set it up.

 

[Maniacmcgoo]

Got carried away and set it up too fast to get many photos. I did a quick clean and measured boil off which looks to be 2 gal hr when just set to automatic. The RIMS is the star of the show so far though. It kept the mash at between 150 and 152 steadily.

The mess around the brew station will get lugged away next week with the recycling.