OK, I'll Post

Discussion relating to using BCS system in a commercial environment
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CJKogut
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OK, I'll Post

Post by CJKogut »

I warn you readers that I take lousy photos and don't know how to post them, but I'll try a few.

I planned to post my project at some point in the future, but since I was posting another photo in the forums this morning, I thought I'd throw one up here with my control panel. This was a home brewery that got out of control and turned into a micro brewery that they (the State and Fed's) tell me will be approved for our license in 3-4 weeks. With so many valves and equipment limitations that made extra valves necessary, the BCS460 with an expansion card seemed like a natural fit. The panel on the left is for 120V loads, which are simply 2 fractional HP pumps. The panel on the right is all 24VAC loads, which are currently 9 solenoid valves for liquid and a 24V gas valve with a pilot. I could use some additional temperature probes, but currently have a kettle probe, a pre-heat exchanger probe and a post-heat exchanger probe. The 4th is an auxilary probe which I have monitoring a cold room, but will also move to my grain supply to get a pre-mash grain temperature to plug into promash on brewday.

The basic design intent is a 1 burner, 2 pump HERMS system. All my brew water is heated in the kettle at one time. I can auto fill and heat the kettle. I hit my mash water temperature and then the system lays in the foundation water from the bottom of the Mash Tun, then it switches the mash water flow to the top of the tun while I dough in. I do a constant recirculation of the mash through 1 side of a plate heat exchanger. The kettle still contains sparge water, and has it heated to 190 or whatever by the time I'm done mashing in. That water is circulated through the other side of the plate exchanger as needed to regulate the mash bed temperature via the BCS PID control. I can also automatically cool the mash if I ever have to. So that's the HERMS without a separate heated hot liquor tank. I either batch sparge the entire sparge water amount to the Tun or I use a holding tank overhead for gravity fly sparging. I can dole out measured water quantities via a nifty sight glass sensor which I posted in another thread.

I have simple 3 position switches that are effective for hand-off-auto control of my 24 volt valves. The burner heats my jacketed kettle 3 plus degrees per minute with 100 gallons of water in it. I whirlpool the kettle to try to maintain an even reading. I have a nifty grant in order to get my mash contents back into the kettle for boil without creating a negative pressure on the grain bed and getting a stuck mash. If I were to get a stuck mash I can pump up from the bottom of the bed to correct it. The grant has high and low level valves and the BCS programming really shines during the use of the grant transfer. The grant also doubles as a hop-back with screens in both the bottom and the top to contain whole hops and to shield the float valves.

The kettle whirlpools and the BCS programming along with automatic switches and my float valves, make it possible to empty the kettle via the hopback and chill the wort to the fermenter with just my one main pump.

There is a lot of tweaking to go, but it works pretty well already. I need a half dozen more switches, a couple more relays, a couple more valves. I'll be brewing 3 barrel batches of high gravity ales. I'll get some more photos up soon. Cheers.
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ECC
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Re: OK, I'll Post

Post by ECC »

CJKogut wrote:The burner heats my jacketed kettle 3 plus degrees per minute with 100 gallons of water in it. I whirlpool the kettle to try to maintain an even reading. I have a nifty grant in order to get my mash contents back into the kettle for boil without creating a negative pressure on the grain bed and getting a stuck mash. If I were to get a stuck mash I can pump up from the bottom of the bed to correct it. The grant has high and low level valves and the BCS programming really shines during the use of the grant transfer. The grant also doubles as a hop-back with screens in both the bottom and the top to contain whole hops and to shield the float valves.
That's some serious BTU's. Your grant really sounds interesting. Any pics?
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