Pesh's Brew Rig

Ive copied and pasted this from another site, hopefully this works

So this is a 100l, 3 tun, gas fired rims system, controlled by a bcs460 (and eventually a raspberry pi) and has an efficiency in the 80% ish range, this is a proto type (version 2) there will be some small changes to come. 

  so the basic stuff the gas bottles are connected to the system via a change over valve so I dont run out of gas on a brew day, 

the burners are 8kw Euro camping type, 

ive added a aluminium heat shield round the base. ive  no idea if this makes any difference at all.

  so being a Rims it needs a false bottom, about 10% of total volume is under the false bottom, 

 Each pot has a pick up tube to minimise loss, I didn't want to add these for a long time incase it blocked up and I had a stuck rims / sparge to deal with in a 100l pot, (that wouldn't be fun)

but they have been no problem and increased my efficiency from about 70% ish to 85% ish 

  the chiller is a counter flow type that recycles through a spider and back in to the boil kettle to use the chilled wort to chill the rest of the wort. The pump has a by-pass added to slow the flow of wort and to give the pump an easier time. 

Hot and cold water come's from my bath room in food grade hose pipes, this isn't ideal but beats carrying buckets of water / wort. waste water goes through my bath.

as this is a 100l kit the minimum volume I can make is 45l or the temp probes wont be wet and cant take a reading. so to help make cleaning easier with so much malt used I added an over head crane, this is a 2000kg boat winch. With the winch I can lift a mash bag out of the mash tun and slide a box under it and lower the mash bag in to the box catching any drips as it goes.

so the fun stuff.

 so the bcs control screen looks like this.

https://www.embeddedcc.com/ 

This is fully programable with user defined signal ins and outs, and has 4 temp probes the 462 has more in outs and temp probes but I find this is enough. (theres also a 480). The bcs 460 controls the heat of the brewrig, via pre defined out puts through ssr's and a burner controller and can also turn pumps on and off, it cant however control flow rates.

These burner controllers are the boiler type as far as I can gather.

so the liquid flow controllers are 12v 2 way flow valves, with a hall type flow sensor, 

These have been wired to an ardunio mega, but im having problems with the ardunio and windows 10, they wont talk to each other, so soon ill look in to re-writing the program for raspberry pi, then I can automate the mash and sparge and have consistent results each time.

So in the mean time I have these flow rate controllers, these only display the flow rates they cant control the valves, but I can get consistent results.

My fermenter set up is much the same as any one else's

 These are raised off the ground so I can get a bottling bin / keg under, 

 My Fv's are all labelled, FV1 - 4 Rb1 - 4 (racking bin) and BB 1 - 4 (bottling bin) so I can track batches through the system, these are all colour coded. red, blue, green and black, this is a little over the top but I had 2 batches that were off and both went through the same fv so I replaced it with a new one rather than try to clean it again.

 Ive added a sour line too these are marked with red cable tie's the "normal" beer lines have black cable ties.

 so this kit will be stripped down and rebuilt one day and ill make some changes to it the plates the tuns sit on need replaced for stainless steel so there easy to clean and the wireing need neatened, but other than that its not a bad kit.

So since writing this quite a while ago ive managed to get the arduino working and the kit is semi automated i only need to add the malt and the hops and stir it every now and then, im still planning to strip the kit down but other then turning it 90 degrees and neatening up every thing it wont be changed much at all.

Pesh