Advice on 2nd brew

[andyctr]

Hi all, wonder if I could pick your brains, after several kits I have completed one full mash brew and all the signs look good, I hope to brew number two this weekend, first time I mashed in a home made mash tun (two fermenting buckets inside each other and plenty of insulation, that worked a treat. I then fly sparged from water being kept at 78-80degs in the boiler, I ran the wort into my origonal fermentation bucket but obviously could not start the boil until the sparging was completed, (around an hour) My question is to speed the start of the boil I would rather pour the wort straight into the boiler, If I heated up my sparging water first and kept this in the origonal fermenting bucket, how important is the 78-80 degs being maintained, if it takes around the hour to sparge, I am concerned that while starting at the right temperature after an hour or so the temperature will have dropped with me having no method of re-heating other that topping up with the kettle. Hope this makes sense and would welcome any comments. Sorry for the rather long first message!
Andy

[Frothy]

It's quite common to use an insulated container to hold the pre-heated sparge water. It won't hold the temp as well as the mash because the grains are relatively self-insulating.

Matt

[mysterio]

I agree with DaaB, the sparge temperature isn't critical. I reckon you could sparge with water in your HLT with a temperature from 60 to 90 C without any loss in efficiency or detrimental tannin extraction. Probably even a wider range than that.

I usually start sparging with water around the ~85C mark and forget about the temperature after that. I find the water loses a few degrees on its way to the mash tun.