I really enjoy electric brewing, it allows me to brew
pretty much in any climate hot, cold, whatever.
But one of the downsides of electric brewing indoors
is that you have to deal with the steam coming off of the kettle.
Now, you can do what I have done and either build
or buy a hood, which may possibly cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
There is another option, and that is the steam condenser in this video.
I'm going to show you how to build one that's not too expensive.
There are a couple of things that I want to get out of the way right up front.
Number one is that these devices, when attached to a kettle,
whether all in one or a different type of brewing system, they get extremely hot.
So definitely, definitely use caution, use ove glove or a rag
or something like that whenever you're handling these.
Secondly, if you're looking at a steam condenser option to reduce
any kind of smell,
maybe your significant other doesn't like the smell associated with brewing.
This is really not going to be a solution for that issue.
It will help with the steam, obviously.
But whenever you're boiling and it boils off DM's,
it does have a weird smell to me.
It's less pleasant than actual the smell of actual brewing.
And finally, you know, you guys have to help me and hit the like button.
The last time that my buddy Keith Stone asked, you guys to hit the like button.
I mean, we got more likes on that video than I've ever seen before.
So unless you guys want me to have him come back and beg you for likes again.
Hit that like button.
One other thing I wanted to cover is give credit for the designer of this.
I am not the person that actually came up with this design.
If you go over to Homebrewtalk, I'll leave a link
in the description down below for the thread over there.
Brun Dog on the homebrewtalk thread actually developed
this came up with the parts list, everything
except for what I'm using to adapt it to the All-In-One systems.
And that's another thing. It's not just for all in one system.
If you use the T in the spray assembly,
you could port that into the side of a kettle
and use it on a regular system as well that just has a lid that sits on top.
But this will work with the way I'm showing it here,
will work with the Brazilia.
The easy boil, the grainfather,
the anvil foundry, I mean, pretty much any of the all in one systems
that have the ability to have a metal lid on them with a hole in them.
So what you're going to need to construct this is a 1.5" tri-clamp 90,
a six inch tri-clamp, spool a six inch T.
And then for the sprayer assembly,
what we've got is a 1.5" tri-clamp to half inch NPT.
And that's all completely through.
So it will accept half inch NPT on the top and the bottom.
Then you're also going to need a half inch NPT nipple.
That is two and a half inches long, a half inch
NPTto eighth inch NPT adapter like a bell adapter.
And then you'll also need the eight inch NPT spray nozzle,
and that is a 9.49 gallon per hour at 40 psi spray nozzle.
I believe that the spray pattern on it is 30 degrees.
Now, before you go clicking off the video going, oh,
my God, it's another one of those things that uses a whole bunch of water.
And I don't want to use something
that uses ten gallons of water while I'm brewing blah, blah, blah.
There are a couple of things to consider.
Number one, reduce your brew, your your boil time to 30 minutes,
and that will help.
But then secondly, later on in the video, I actually have a recirculation option
that I'm going to go over with you
that uses about four to five gallons of water for an entire hour boil.
One other thing to note, whenever you construct
the spray components, everything needs to have a good amount of Teflon tape.
You're talking about 40 to 60, even 80 psi sometimes.
So you want to make sure that everything
is nice and Teflon tape when you put it together
so you don't have any leaks or anything like that.
Now, you're also going to need a 3/4" hose bib if you're going to hook this up
to like a faucet or your your hose fitting outside
along with some reinforced high pressure tubing.
And then also some 3/8 hose clamps.
Now, the connections to the sprayer are a 1/2" NPT 90 to 3/8" hose barb.
And then on the bottom of the assembly, where the exhaust or the
the exit for the fluid is the steam and both the spray from the condenser,
that is a 3/4" to 1.5" Tri-clamp barb.
And then I have spec'd in the parts list to get two feet of hose.
I have a little bit less than that.
And it works fine. But, you know, you might want a little bit longer hose.
You can go down into a bucket.
That is the other thing that I need to mention.
When you use this device, you definitely cannot have
the outlet end that is down in the bucket, submerged in water.
If you do that, it completely nullifies the suction
and the vacuum effect that the ventury in the in
the T has on the steam coming out, and it basically will stop working.
Now, you're also going to need five dry
clamps and five dry clamp gaskets in order to put the entire assembly together.
Now, one thing I want to show you with regard to the way
that the spray nozzle is positioned in the tee,
which I think makes this very effective, when you assemble everything,
the spray nozzle actually sits below the opening in the side of the tee.
So an issue with some condensers is that I've heard of or seen out there
is that they are actually the spray is actually going back into the kettle
with this system.
There's basically zero possibility of that happening
because all of the spray that comes out of the nozzle
is below that opening in the tee, which I think makes it highly effective.
Now, for the connection to the kettle, you're going to need a bulkhead.
And I actually found a specific bulkhead.
I kind of bought this on accident for something else.
But then when I started putting this together, it worked really, really well.
It is a 1.5" tri-clamp bulkhead and something that's
different about this one than the other.
The ones that I've seen this one uses like a really thick silicone oaring,
which is like the same size as the entire diameter of the bulkhead.
And what that allows is it allows it to give
give you a little bit of slack or a little bit of
forgiveness, if you will, to attach it to the top of the lid.
And when you attach it, just make sure that everything is centered in the night.
The nut is tightened down as much as possible.
There's two sides to the nut on this thing and make sure you use the one
that's flat if you use the side that has the ridge on it.
It won't tighten down all the way.
You may also be thinking,
hey, this looks like it might be good for the bucket fermenter.
Yes, it does actually fit the bucket fermenter lid perfectly.
So if you're looking for an option for the anvil bucket fermenter, this
this bulkhead actually fits that opening like a glove.
Now, one of the things that I experienced after I got the assembly put together
and got it installed in place, I did notice that the lid on the anvil
foundry was just a little bit flexible and kind of flimsy.
And I had some issues where it was kind of wobbling around,
and I just didn't feel really great about that.
So what I did was actually employed a there's a couple of options
you can do that.
The easiest and cheapest option is a half inch nut.
Now, that's like a half inch thread sized nut.
And then what I did was I basically just slid it right up underneath the tri-clamp
nut on the tri clamp.
And that actually provides enough support
and keeps it from being as flimsy as it was without it.
It does still allow with everything attached, the hoses and all that stuff,
there is a little bit of a downward angle.
What you do need on these steam condenser so that if there's any water
that accumulates in the pipe, the six inch, the six inch tube,
it will run downhill and out of the steam condenser.
Now, the other option that you can do, which I also show here,
I wanted to explore two different ones.
If you have a couple of tools, you can do this.
I got a repair strap, which is like a half an inch and two and a half inches long.
And you can drill out one of the holes.
The thread size, incidentally, on a tri clamp is 5/16.
So you would need to drill it with a 5/16 drill bit and then put a bend accordingly
to however, you know, whatever you want as far as how much you want to support it.
And I did mine. You can see how I did mine, and I use the five sixteenths
nut stainless steel to also secure it in the tri clamp.
So all I have to do, put the tri clamp on and then flip this breaks down
and it works just about as well as the nut.
I think the nut is a little bit more secure.
But one of the things
you might be pondering about the nut is, OK, great, I'm going to take this thing
and take the lid off of the the anvil or whatever I'm using,
and then that's going to go flying across the floor and I'll never find it again .
So a solution for that.
If you want to just put a zip tie on the nut and zip tie it to the actual
tri-clamp itself, and that'll keep it right in range where you need it at,
and then you can just slide it underneath to try clamp whenever you need to.
All right. I have to break into the video here literally as I am editing the video.
I get an email from Anvil and they actually have developed
or made a bulkhead that is specifically designed for the foundry.
And I got it just as I was editing this.
So here's an image of it and I'll leave a link for that down
below, which probably will nullify the whole bracket thing.
But I just wanted to throw that out there.
Happened just as I was editing the video, as usual.
All right. Back to the video. Now let's talk about how it performed.
I did some testing before
I got the six inch tube and used a sight glass that I had.
And the cool thing about the sight glass
that kind of allowed me to see what was going on inside.
So as the temperature rose, I was using the Anvil Foundry,
doing the testing on 240 volts as the temperature rose up.
I started to see steam accumulating in the sight glass.
And then as the temperature got higher and higher,
it started to accumulate more and more.
And I had to you know, it was tilted pretty good.
And you could see that the the steam was starting to condense it condense in there.
And this is before I ever even turned on the sprayer.
And as it got up near boiling, you would actually see some steam
and vapor starting to come out of the bottom of the hose,
which indicates that, you know, the thing is working as it should be.
And then as soon as I kicked on
the sprayer, then everything started to pull through there.
And I mean, you could kind of see the droplets
moving through the side glass, which is interesting
because you really can't see inside of the stainless tube.
So that was that was really interesting for me to see that as well.
Now, in my test that I did, I did an hour boil and I use the Anvil Foundry on
70 percent on 240 volts, and I boiled off three quarters of a gallon.
So normally boil offers about a gallon, but I boiled off
three quarters of a gallon using the steam condenser.
You could probably turn the percentage of power
down a little bit more and still, you know, and boil off plenty.
But I use nine gallons of water whenever I did that, which is not too horrible.
But, you know, there is some consumption of water
if you don't use the recirculation method
that we're going to talk about here in just a second.
Now, on 120 volts, I used 80 percent power and actually boiled
for 30 minutes just to give me kind of an idea of what I was looking at.
And the amount that I boiled off at that time was a pint.
So basically, you could look at
if you're boiling for an hour, are you going to get a quart of boil off,
which is about, you know, that's that's a little bit
that's almost half of what you get if you boil with the lid off.
Now, speaking of boil with the lid on or off.
We recommend not putting the lid on or the steam condenser with the lid
and everything on until you reach a boil and you deal with your hot break.
If you don't, there's a good chance that the hot break can get up
all the way to the top
and then come out of the steam condenser and it just makes a horrendous mess.
So my recommendation is
definitely not to take it all the way to boil with a lid on.
Bring it to boil,
deal with the hot break, then continue with your steam condenser operation.
Now, the recirculation option was pretty interesting.
I found a pump that's like $20, draws 3 amps.
I found a power supply that was actually 3 amps.
I also found that the power supply,
the power supply
that I have spent as an adapter so you can actually wire in the raw wires
from the pump into this connector , and then you just connect
and disconnected as you as you need it.
And that pump is capable of putting out 80 psi.
It does have an adjustment on the end.
You can screw and unscrew the the set screw in the end of the pump
head and adjust what the pressure is, turning it on and off.
The only downside, really, to the recirculation pump is that
it is a little bit noisy and can be a little bit annoying.
It's not overly noisy.
It's about 61 decibels or something like that at a couple of feet.
And you know, me talking right now to the camera like this,
this is probably anywhere from 70 to 75 decibels.
So it's not as loud as me talking in a room.
But I will tell you that I was editing a video
while I was doing the testing and the you know, it would build pressure,
then stop build pressure and stop and kind of be like [anoying noise].
So that did get a little bit annoying, so just be aware
that, you know, if you do use the recirculation option,
it can be a little bit annoying
to people in the room or whatever, but it is a way to definitely save on water.
So what I did with the test
of the recirculation pump was I had four gallons of water
and let it run for an hour.
And what I did was about halfway through, I put probably was probably about three
or four pounds of ice.
It was like basically the ice tray from my fridge down here in the basement.
I dumped it in the bucket and I started out with
like 60 degree water, dumped the ice in halfway through.
And then by the time I was done with
the boil was only about 110 degrees, something like that in the bucket.
So that's definitely enough of a temperature differential between
what's coming out of the kettle and what's going into the steam condenser
to be able to condense the liquid and have a good use.
One quick wiring note on the pump.
If you decide to go that way
on the adapter that comes with the power supply, it has a positive and a negative.
The red wire goes to the positive terminal and the yellow wire
goes to the negative terminal.
The other thing that I found with the pump is that
you'd need to prime it before you hook it up to the steam condenser.
So it is a self priming pump,
but because of the resistance of the nozzle in the steam condenser,
it won't pull the liquid out as easily as if you just disconnect the hose,
prime it, let it start flowing through and then hook it up to the steam condenser.
So that's just kind of a little caveat of using that.
I know this was a long video.
I really appreciate you staying to the end if you made it this far.
You know, if you enjoy this type of video, give it a like.
Let me know in the comments down below that you enjoyed the video.
And this is something that you're interested in.
This has been Brian for Short Circuited Brewers. We'll see on the next video.