I got the 130L one as it was in stock and not a lot more expensive than the 120L one (which was the nearest to what I wanted but not in stock at the time). It turns out to be generous as its 130L to below the shoulder so its even more excessive for my needs than I'd expected. I'm probably going to be filling it to about 90L max, but at least thats a lot of room for the bubbles!
As you can see its got a decently sharp cone (I think it was 60 degrees on the website) and there is no big recess/shoulder for the stand, which would catch yeast. £150 (including vat and P&P) was a major expense for me and seems especially costly as my current FVs are just recycled mango tubs (to be honest I'm a bit dubious about having spent this much on a plastic tank), so I didn't get the ready-made stand as it would have been about £80 more.
However there's a small rim that looks potential for supporting it; I'll probably either bend a metal ring or rout a circle out of some ply. Inside theres a small bulge where the recess is, but its quite gentle/rounded/smooth - the plastic has just been formed to an exterior crisp shape, presumably by blow-moulding:
Here's the tap thread, a 1" brass female thread. It says not to overtighten, but not how tight is too tight. There's also a 55C limit which is interesting - its made of HDPE, like the blue bins some people boil in..
The threads aren't punched right through like some plastic conicals I've seen, rather there's a smooth hole that looks to be just under 1" diameter. I'm not sure what I'm going to do to make this free from hidey holes for nasties, but I suspect if I screwed a stainless male thread up to the end of the threads and sealed where it meets the plastic with LS-X that may work. The plastic is about 8mm thick around the brass insert and more like 15mm at the bottom of the cone.
So far all seems well, but I'm 'somewhat less impressed' with the top. Its about 2mm thick here and theres a hole cut somewhat crudely into it.
and when it arrived it had this black threaded ring and lid fixed in place with several nuts and machine screws (and one washer!) - theres a rubber seal but due to the top of the tank bending away between the bolts (the ripple effect you can see was even worse with the screws done up) it wasn't doing much in the way of sealing. More importantly with all the nuts, threads and different parts cleaning/sanitising would be awkward. I guess its not a deal-breaker - I just use a cloth on the current FVs - but its not quite what I'd hoped for.
So thats it, I'm largely happy but not especially blown away by it. A stainless conical may ultimately be better value, as this seems a £lot for a relatively crude plastic tank without taps or racking arm (I guess even plastic is expensive in lower volume products - I couldn't find a cheaper one anywhere without big recesses/ridges in the shape), but we'd be talking £500+ for a stainless one and I can't afford that at the moment.
Hope thats useful to someone, anyway.
Kev
