Herms Coil Size

[blawford]

I am looking to add re-circulation to my 3 tier setup. I am currently planning (unless anyone has any strong advise to contrary) to put a coil inside a £5 Wilko kettle and control it with a PID that I already have. I was wondering, from anyone that has done this already (I've seen it pictured a few times - @strange-steve ?) how much copper I need for the coil?

 

[strange-steve]

It was a few years ago I made mine, but if memory serves I used about 3 meters of 10 mm microbore pipe. It worked brilliantly, but it was a lot of extra faff to set up and clean.

 

[blawford]

It was a few years ago I made mine, but if memory serves I used about 3 meters of 10 mm microbore pipe. It worked brilliantly, but it was a lot of extra faff to set up and clean.

Thanks. When I made a immersion chiller I just bought 10m of 10mm from Screwfix, seemed a bit wasteful to do that again for this.

Surprised to hear you say it was a pain to setup and clean. Is setup more difficult than connecting the temperature probe of the PID and disconnects? I was planning to run sparge water through the coil after the re-circulation phase in order to clean out any sticky wort.

Would appreciate hearing your experiences on the matter so I know what I am getting myself in for if I proceed. Although I already bought a pump, so I probably will give it a go regardless.

 

[strange-steve]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put you off the idea. It's not really a big deal setting it up and cleaning, but after a while I tried to streamline and shorten my brewdays so the HERMS was the first thing to go.

It served its purpose though, at the time I was brewing small 15L batches and struggled to maintain mash temperature but the HERMS sorted it. Also nice to have the ability to step-mash.

 

[BREWERS DROOP]

Keep toying with the idea of incorporating my chugger pump into my 3 pots for a recirculation mash, but not sure how. My mash tun doesn't have an element, but the other 2 pots contain a 5kw element,and I can only run one element at any one time due to a single controller

 

[blawford]

Keep toying with the idea of incorporating my chugger pump into my 3 pots for a recirculation mash, but not sure how. My mash tun doesn't have an element, but the other 2 pots contain a 5kw element,and I can only run one element at any one time due to a single controller

I don't have a element in my mash tun either. What I am planning (and what people have done before) is putting a copper coil inside a a domestic kettle and then monitoring the temperature of the wort before it goes back into the mash tun, then letting the power of the kettle be controlled by a PID controller.

 

[Bigcol49]

Keep toying with the idea of incorporating my chugger pump into my 3 pots for a recirculation mash, but not sure how. My mash tun doesn't have an element, but the other 2 pots contain a 5kw element,and I can only run one element at any one time due to a single controller

Hi!
There have been posts in this forum about using the cooling coil as a HERMS coil.
If you place it inside the HLT and heat up the water then you could run your wort through the coil. The probe monitoring the wort temperature would control the element in the HLT.