What burner are you using?

[denimglen]

I'm slowly aquiring parts for a single tier set up.

I'm stumped at which burners to use at the moment.

What's everyone using and how do you find it?

Cheers and beers,

Glenim.

[Doublehoppy]

I've got a 3 ring burner from BBQ Factory under a 50lt SS keg. Haven't used in anger yet as it's taken me months to sort out a tap for the keg. It's now in an engineering shop being cut & welded. I did try it out with just water and what I noticed was that the flame blew around a fair bit in the wind and also it threw off A LOT of soot. This is from an LPG bottle.

Once I clean out the jets and get a sleeve to shelter the flame and funnel the heat I'm pretty confident that this will do the business.

[Daron]

Just bought a 3ring burner from here : http://thecampingoutlet.co.nz/gas/stoves.php for $80.00.

[Chris Banks]

4 ring under a Keggle the burner didnt work to well of the shelf but a few mods and shes away!
seems to be a common story with the cheap ring burners!

[Patrick]

What mods did you do? I have a 3 ring from bunnings and it is OK but very sooty and some yellow flame.

[Chris Banks]

One of the big things with the ring burners is getting them enough air in and giving the burnt gas somewhere to go I pulled mine apart and gave it good old port and polish to remove all the casting dingleberrys around the air openings where the lpg nozzles are this made a big difference.

The other thing was sitting a keg straight on top of it tends to smother the flames a bit ithink the shape of the bottom rim captures the burnt gas so its a bit like having a blocked chimney
Raising the keg up of the burner 100mm or so made a big difference here also.

With all that done I now have no soot

If you think its the burner itself try running it on its own it should be possible to get a nice blue flame by adjusting the collars on each nozzle

[Patrick]

Cool, dad has a die-grinder and a set of stones that he uses for cylinder-heads, might have to borrow them!

[Pilgrim]

I'll second that, I've got a 3 ring under a 56Lt pot and when I sat the pot straight on top it burned very yellow and created a lot of soot. Now I've lifted it off about 50ml and it's much better. The small ring still burns a bit yellow though even with the air port wide open so I might do a bit of fettling with the die grinder as well.

[Michael]

Yip. I cleaned out my 3 ring as Chris suggested some time ago, and since I did this, and have a keg that stands higher (Chris made it.) I do not have any more soot.
The only problem for me now is that I have to change my rig to electric. The place where I am living now does not allow any gas burners within two hundred feet of the building. :(

This has put a cramp into my brewing.

[Stu H]

Gutted! Let us know how you go about the electric conversion... I'm pretty curious about this electric malarky...

[DP]

I had the same problem. Read this write-up about the problems I found with my setup. (yellow flames are dangerous -- you need to allow more air in)

As an aside, my four-ring GasMate burner takes 25min to get 25L of cold water to 80deg. I did time how long it took to get to the boil for the sparge but I seem to have forgotten to take a note of it. Perhaps 30-35mins.

[Daron]

Thanks for the link ! I wondered what the hell those disks are for and tightened them up as I heard them labouring to get air in....thought that was a bad thing !

The burner doesnt come with any setup instructions so hope this helps.

[Llew Bardecki]

I just use my BBQ.
Take the grill and plate off, and just sit my 32L SS pot right on top of the burners. It's a fairly short, large diameter pot, so it sits neatly across two of the three burners.

May not be the most elegant or efficient solution, but it does the trick. And given that the BBQ and tank only cost me $10 to begin with it's certainly the cheapest option :)