Useful article on water usage/volumes

[r8rphan]

Was out looking for info on how much adding grain to mash water increases overall volume (resulting volume of water + grains), and came across this article which lays out the whole process of calculating water usage.. Most articles or threads deal with only part of the process, so I thought his might be useful to anyone looking for answers to any part of it, or new brewers trying to figure it out or those trying to figure out out big their system/vessels need to be...

CALCULATING WATER USAGE: ADVANCED BREWING

 

[PDevlin75]

Right on, thanks for putting this up here! That was a pretty useful read!

I'm getting closer each time, but I'm still trying to get a reliable handle on my process. As it is, I almost always winding up with a larger pre-boil volume than beersmith predicts. Typically by about a quart over. HOWEVER, I'm now wondering if that might be due to an increase of volume based on the temperature of the wort?

I always think I have more volume than I need, so I attempt to boil it off. Unfortunately, I then wind up with less cooled wort going into my fermenter! I've decided to stop thinking I know better than the software, and just stop boiling when it tells me to. Last batch went smoothly once I adopted that mindset.

I only have a 10 gallon cooler that I mash in. I'm not losing anything from pumps, lines or sparge vessel deadspace, so I've got that going for me. It's just down to grain absorption, some mash tun deadpsace, and evaporation & cooling.

The article accounts for grain absorption of the sparge water. I guess I'm wrong again, but I would have thought that the grains should have absorbed all they could from the strike water, no?

Thanks again! Good info!
-Pete