Hazelwood Brewday

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Yesterday the fittings arrived for plumbing in my new heat-exchanger (car radiator) so that was today’s job.

It’s a generic radiator for small cars costing £23 and I needed to adapt from the 32mm inlet and outlet pipes to my 3/8” JG fittings and pipe work. Here’s the radiator with the fittings attached.

View attachment 47758
There is a 32mm-19mm silicon elbow attached to the radiator. Into that I’ve fitted a 19mm-12mm pond hose adapter. That’s connected to a 3/8 JG stem connector (1/2” barb) via a length of 1/2” bore silicon tube.

...and fitted. The odd looking pipe attached to the top left corner is the expansion / bleed pipe, now closed off.
View attachment 47759
I have yet to insulate the pipes from the ceiling down but want to give it a soak test first. I also need to refit some guttering to take away the condensation.

Early result are promising with good air-flow (yay!) and very cold air coming out, gave me goosebumps! The temperature started to drop within a couple of minutes. The fan is fitted in suck mode and I’m pretty confident this is the way to go if anyone wants to do something along similar lines.

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Brilliant news - if you want to get still more airflow, then could you fit another fan to the other side in 'blow' mode?

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

Brilliant news - if you want to get still more airflow, then could you fit another fan to the other side in 'blow' mode?

Possibly. I think I may have enough now but if not I could consider it as an option along with a bigger fan and a more powerful fan. The one I’m using is a 12” fan and shifts 2,000 cubic feet/minute (not through the heat exchanger though!).

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Possibly. I think I may have enough now but if not I could consider it as an option along with a bigger fan and a more powerful fan. The one I’m using is a 12” fan and shifts 2,000 cubic feet/minute (not through the heat exchanger though!).

The ‘fan sandwich’ approach should work especially well because it reduces the pressure difference across the fan, which is where a lot of your problem lies, I suspect :-)

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

I got that guttering fitted today under the heat-exchanger and now got the system on soak test. Brew-shed temperatures almost restored.

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

@Hazelwood Brewery you are dangerous: you keep giving me ideas!

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

@Hazelwood Brewery you are dangerous: you keep giving me ideas!

Do you have a problem to solve or just looking for a project?

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Do you have a problem to solve or just looking for a project?

The trouble is I look at your setup - it‘s less a ‘brew shed’ than a ‘brew mansion’ and it makes me think what I could do with my own setup... but there are so many other less exciting jobs I should be getting on with

 

[Benfleet Brewery]

The trouble is I look at your setup - it‘s less a ‘brew shed’ than a ‘brew mansion’ and it makes me think what I could do with my own setup... but there are so many other less exciting jobs I should be getting on with

You are one step ahead of me. I want a Shed conversion like that but haven’t even got a shed to convert!

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

The trouble is I look at your setup - it‘s less a ‘brew shed’ than a ‘brew mansion’ and it makes me think what I could do with my own setup... but there are so many other less exciting jobs I should be getting on with

Ah! Yes, I have the same distractions from all the really important stuff in my brew-shed. Recently I’ve been painting fences, painting furniture, rendering flower beds, oiling decking, and I still have a list! Good job I retired recently

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Good job I retired recently

yeah, me too - but strangely it doesn’t seem to have resulted in the massive increase in my ability to progress all my projects and ‘little jobs’ that I thought it would... where does all the time go? (Well, a good part of it goes on reading every post on this forum... I need to cut down again LoL)

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

I left the cooling system running all night and this morning it’s as quiet as a mouse. The last time I checked on it yesterday was around 11pm, the temperature was at 10 degrees and the cooling was off - you can see on the control panel that coolant is being directed to the python rather than the brew-shed heat-exchanger.

This morning the temperature is at 9.8 degrees and the cooling system is again off - I suspect from the temperature that it turned off just a minute or two before I took this picture.

Importantly, the heat-exchanger isn’t frosted at all and only has a little condensation in the lower left corner where the coolant comes in.

I’m encouraged so far and looking forward to seeing how it performs as temperatures rise over the next few days.

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

Brilliant
Do you think you might need one of these now, so that you can log how the temperature changes over time ?

(yes, I am a very bad man LoL)

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

I definitely need one of those because now I need to tune the duty cycle

I’ve been monitoring what’s happening this morning and it takes half an hour for the temperature to rise 0.5 degrees. It then takes 3 minutes to chill down again. This means my motorised valves are briefly cycling twice an hour which is far more than needed and there’s no way I need to control the temperature of the shed to within half a degree.

I think I might start by increasing the differential to 2 degrees and see how that changes these variables. Unless I plan to sit out there all day and monitor what’s happening I need a data logger

Desire rationalised!

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

You've evidently done a really brilliant job on the insulation to have it only rising at 1º/hr; I just pulled the logs for my insulated cabinet and it looks like I'm getting more like 7º/hr
Mind you the ambient in the garage is about 18º and there is 25L of lager fermenting slowly away inside :-)
-

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

I suspect the reality will be somewhere in between because the ambient temperature here is about 12C and I have nothing fermenting at present. The logger will tell us the real story.

 

[Benfleet Brewery]

Depending on how much time you want to spend on it, you could very cheaply build some temperature sensors and a controller.

https://www.mysensors.org/build/temp
I have built a few sensors and use them with a free OS software to monitor/log/send alerts for my fridge and freezer temperature, alert me if the door has been open longer than X seconds etc.

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

I have built a few sensors and use them with a free OS software to monitor/log/send alerts for my fridge and freezer temperature, alert me if the door has been open longer than X seconds etc.

You should have a chat with @The-Engineer-That-Brews and compare notes because he’s done similar stuff with a neat little programmable board, the ESP32.

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

I’ve had another productive day today, I’ve been cracking on with getting my fermentation cabinet done. The structural stuff is done as you can see below. I’m not entirely happy with the ply shelf so I intend to replace this with batons running front-to-back like in your airing cupboard but that can wait for now.

Just the door to add. I have built it and now need to give it a few coats of boat varnish. The structure is ply and it’s filled with 2 inches of Kingspan insulation.