Tap and beer line cleaning?

[day_trippr]

"Line resistance matters", and forty feet of 4mm ID tubing is going to have hella high resistance
Go parallel...

Cheers!

 

[Michele Craft]

"Line resistance matters", and forty feet of 4mm ID tubing is going to have hella high resistance
Go parallel...

Cheers!

Sorry, parallel?

 

[day_trippr]

"Did I stutter?"
(Lol! That's a line from The Breakfast Club and I've been waiting forever to use it )

But, yes, parallel: I run a 6 tap t-tower and even back in the "12 feet of 3/16" ID tubing per tap" days trying to recirculate cleaner through all of that tubing was never going to work in a serial fashion. So I had Matt's crew at chicompany.net cook up a "sanitizing manifold" with enough ball lock posts to fit all of my QDs plus an input liquid post and a gas input post. Looks like this (excuse the following horrible pictures, I think I have better ones but damned if I can find them right now):

In use it looks like this:

Then I used a bunch of PVC fittings to cobble up a return manifold that looks like this:

With all that in place I use a pair of 5 gallon buckets with a decent pond pump to rinse the lines out, then recirculate BLC or LLC (whichever I have in stock) for 20 minutes or so, then rinse it all back out, then I can plug a gas QD on the same input manifold and blow out any residual liquid if desired. Cleans everything from QDs through flow meters through beer lines through faucets...

Cheers!

 

[Knightshade]

I’m hardly an authority, but this is my process.

I’ve got a 4 tap keg with duotight lines. When a keg kicks, ill take my dedicated big sprayer with a carbonation cap and push about 1/2G of tap water through the line. Then I put an aquarium pump into a bucket full of BLC. That pump has a ball lock connector on the end. I take a small piece of evabarrier line which has a carbonation cap on both ends. One end connects to pump, other connects to the ball lock. Shove a piece of line onto faucet and let it run back into the bucket. Let it recirc for at least 15 minutes. Guess it depends of if I get distracted doing something else.

Hook up bug sprayer again, flush about 1/2G of tap water.

Repeat bucket process, this time with Star San.

Hook up big sprayer again, this time with RO and when Star San is fully flushed, call it good. When new keg is ready, flush lines with Star San with bug sprayer. Hook up keg, flush out Star San and enjoy.

Honestly…today I’ve been distracted all day with floating thoughts trying to figure out how I can NOT have to disassemble my damn faucets for cleaning EVERY flippin time because I like having the self returning springs in there. Because I evidently like to torque my faucets a little too hard when I’m putting them back together..which can cause the lines inside the tower to push against each other……which can cause a leak……and I can’t just walk away as deceived above with the springs in place…..*sigh*

 

[Michele Craft]

"Did I stutter?"
(Lol! That's a line from The Breakfast Club and I've been waiting forever to use it )

But, yes, parallel: I run a 6 tap t-tower and even back in the "12 feet of 3/16" ID tubing per tap" days trying to recirculate cleaner through all of that tubing was never going to work in a serial fashion. So I had Matt's crew at chicompany.net cook up a "sanitizing manifold" with enough ball lock posts to fit all of my QDs plus an input liquid post and a gas input post. Looks like this (excuse the following horrible pictures, I think I have better ones but damned if I can find them right now):

View attachment 730179

In use it looks like this:

View attachment 730181

Then I used a bunch of PVC fittings to cobble up a return manifold that looks like this:

View attachment 730180

With all that in place I use a pair of 5 gallon buckets with a decent pond pump to rinse the lines out, then recirculate BLC or LLC (whichever I have in stock) for 20 minutes or so, then rinse it all back out, then I can plug a gas QD on the same input manifold and blow out any residual liquid if desired. Cleans everything from QDs through flow meters through beer lines through faucets...

Cheers!

Born in 76 and just saw breakfast club all the way thru within the last year, shocking I know!

So doing it your way makes a lot of sense now that I see it. All gets done at once but nothing has to take a super long path. how strong is your pump? It seems so weird that my 1100 gpm pump can't push thru the 40 or so feet of line but I guess resistance really does matter. Makes me wonder why they don't rate pumps by their push power VS just gpm. Even my bilge pump I think it's only 2000gpm so I'll be curious to see if doing 2 at a time will work.

 

[micraftbeer]

Makes me wonder why they don't rate pumps by their push power VS just gpm.

Actually, they do, it can just be hard to find. They rate them with "head" or "lift", with a distance in feet (or meters). You can then find info on internet on equivalent head/lift different lines give you per linear foot.

I did the calculation once while comparing pumps for recirculating wort through a wort chiller. So armed with the knowledge of this rating and calculation method, I've frequently asked myself why I don't research and do the math on my keezer line cleaning pump, and I get no good answers... I guess just pure laziness.

 

[Michele Craft]

Actually, they do, it can just be hard to find. They rate them with "head" or "lift", with a distance in feet (or meters). You can then find info on internet on equivalent head/lift different lines give you per linear foot.

I guess I aways thought head was purely feet above pump it could push, that's why I put the pump up on a table so it was closer to top but if it's a cumulative thing, then the 4 lines up and down yeah I'd be high. Wondering if coiling them up so they don't hang so low would help the cause, or pulling them out straighter when we were testing them outside the keezer to see what happened. There I had them hanging down so that may not have helped.

 

[micraftbeer]

I'm looking for the website with info for calculation but the head is a measure of how many feet above pump it could push, so it is equivalently a pump output pressure. Think of that as your "pump bank account". You then "pay bills" for: 1) Distance from your pump output up to the highest height in your system, 2) Length of beer lines it has to pump through (smaller diameter lines have higher flow restriction so come at a higher "cost"), 3) Joints/restrictions in addition to the lines (beer faucet, each connection from ball lock to another ball lock, etc).

If you add up all your "bills" and it exceeds your "pump bank account", you just get a trickle, or nothing at all coming out. You then have to either reduce your bills (connect less lines), or get a bigger bank account by finding a pump with a higher head pressure/lift.

 

[Michele Craft]

Yeah I think it's like 2.31 as the factor in the calculation if I recall (tried to forget fluid drnamics from college)

 

[micraftbeer]

At risk of being pummeled mercilessly by forum hawks, I plugged in some numbers into an online head pressure calculator I found at Hazen-Williams Equation - calculating Head Loss in Water Pipes

I used the 4 mm ID beer line, the approximate length of my beer lines (5 ft), estimated roughness coefficient based on some tabular data for various materials, I then iterated to a flow rate that matched the head pressure rating of my pump (11 ft). That was a flow rate of 0.5 gallons/minute, which is about right for what I get when cleaning keezer lines one at a time.

Note that the Quality Draft Manual suggests you want your cleaning recirc to be about 2x your normal pouring speed, which would be about 1.5 gpm. As reference, my Blichmann RipTide pump (which would require a different setup arrangement than just a sump pump in a bucket of cleaner) has a head pressure of 21 ft. At this same flowrate, I could do 10 ft of lines.

 

[micraftbeer]

Back checking my numbers above, using the calculator on that website, to get to the 0.75 gpm flow rate I get out of my taps, it says it would require a head of 23.23 ft. And using @Michele Craft number memory, to convert feet of lift to psi, you divide by 2.31, and get 10 psi. So that boxes, since my keezer pressure is in the 12 psi range and that's the rough flow rate I get (and my simplified calculations on the web page don't include any choke/restriction points like ball lock disconnects, and the lift from my bucket of cleaner and the taps). So it seems this calculation/process is in the right neighborhood.