Post
by Kev888 » Tue Sep 28, 2010 9:57 am
Hiya,
I tried one on my old MT and was sold on the idea. As you'll gather from that thread it basically acts like an external overflow that you can set the height of - so you can simply sparge at the rate you want and not have to worry about balancing the rate at which you drain it off. I like to keep an inch or so of water over the grains when sparging and its really ideal for maintaining this.
The only negatives I've found so far is that it needs gravity to work (so the height of my boiler with this above it makes the MT fairly high) and you still have to be there because if you get a stuck mash/sparge it carries on filling.
For the former issue I guess you could pump the drain off if it ran into a sump containing a pump that was able to run dry, but that seems too fiddly to me - easier just to have the MT above the boiler. The latter issue isn't different to many systems of course, and is less likey with this slow gravity method than with pumped ones, but I went with the false bottom as I believe that gives most chance of it not sticking. In the future I could connect the pump that will pump in the sparge water to some sort of float switch in the MT as a failsafe, so i could then leave it running unattended if I wanted - but if it turns out to be reliable as is I probably won't bother.
Cheers
kev
Kev
