Kauri Road Brewery 2.2

[Barry]

Tiny bit more progress tonight saw my making holes in my stainless pots for the electric elements.

Massive thanks to Guy Gibson for the lend of the chassis punch, legend.

I'm doing these following theelectricbrewery.com's instructions to the letter – 2 gang metal junction box, faceplates either side, 32mm hole through a faceplate on the back, element, oring, washer on the outside, lock nut on the inside. Unsurprisingly looks like it'll be perfect.

The hold up has been waiting for some stuff to arrive from Amazon – 3 weeks overdue. Bah. Finally arrived this week so the holes are done. I'll do the rest of the work with weekend, but the end of it I should have elements all wired up.

Punch on outside:

Punch on inside:

Punch through:

Hole!

And the other one:

Cheers.

[Peter Smith]

where did you get the fitting that goes through the cooler?

[Barry]

I bought this kit off Karl:

Mash tun cooler kit

Reckon it'll work well batch sparging, but haven't tried it yet. At least a month away from that. It's nice and firm, definitely won't crush under the weight of grain unlike all my homemade braided hose manifolds. Pretty tight across the bottom of the cooler, only just fits in which is actually perfect.

[Peter Smith]

yeah I have witnessed the shenanigans required if the braid collapse's in the middle of a sparge, 75C is damn hot as well....   8)

[Crusader-Rob]

Yeah thoe bazooka screens ar ethe shiz, used to use one on my old mash tun, before going back to BIAB.
Still got it too.
Looking good too barry, These holes are for the elements I assume? what size kettle? what size elements are you going with?

[Barry]

Hey, they are indeed for elements. Kettles are 50l, elements are 4500W. These ones.

[Crusader-Rob]

I'll eventually get there. are you doing double batches or standard 23? I'd like an idea of sizes for my 50-60 litre kettle doing normal 20 litre batches, running BIAB no sparge.

[Barry]

Plan is to do 23l batches to fill a single corney keg. Heaps of headspace with 50l pots, and will be able to brew as big a gravity beer as I'll ever want.

I may actually be able to do double batches (2 kegs) of low-hopped beers too, I'll experiment and see, but the plan is to stick with single batches.

[Crusader-Rob]

fair enough, so why such a large 4500w element? I would assume a 3kw one would suffice? are you going to control it somehow?

[Barry]

Speed to heat, vigorous boil. 

My old electric system had a 3KW element and I had to partially cover it to get a vigorous boil. 4.5KW will be heaps.

I am controlling it, with one of these: Controller

If that fails I'll add another PID/SSR combo, but I'm pretty confident that thing will work and I like the concept of a dial control better than a PID on manual/percentage mode.

[Crusader-Rob]

fair enough then, how many watts extra you reckon you'd need to main tai nthe vigorous boil? 3.5? 4?