Does anybody know about these tea urns

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FarmerFred

Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by FarmerFred » Thu May 08, 2014 7:35 pm

Hello! I'm thinking about giving BIAB a go and wondered if anybody had used one of these tea urns on ebay. Look a bit cheap..
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Commercial-St ... 2c7ed81f00
Any advice would be great! Cheers,
Fred

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mbarn
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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by mbarn » Thu May 08, 2014 7:58 pm

Not seen that one before.
I bought a boiler recently (second hand) for that money, but I was advised to buy 40l in order to do full size brews and cope with the water displacement from the grain and evaporation. Some do cope with 33 and 35l though, and top up the water or sparge when needed. My concern would be more on size than absolute quality right now.
Hopefully an expert will chime in.
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FarmerFred

Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by FarmerFred » Thu May 08, 2014 8:56 pm

Thanks mbarn, it must help also with the sums using a 'standard' 40l urn. Well I've managed to get hold of a 25l stockpot just to do a trial run with BIAB as graduating from a few years of kit/extract.

raiderman

Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by raiderman » Fri May 09, 2014 10:01 am

when i started out brewing again I picked up a tea urn. Never measured the size -I'm not a scientific brewer! but it was smaller than the Bru-pack boilers which are 5 gallon bins, and I had no real problems. Don't get me wrong the bigger the better. My current pot is 70l and that makes life easier. You just have to work with smaller quantities of water and top up at the end in the FV. If you sparge by remashing you might have extra liquor you can't boil, but I've never had a problem adding unboiled sparge liquor into the FV. The alternative is to put the grain bag into a backer chuck a couple of kettles of boiling water on t and stand for 15m drain off and add that to the boiler. My feeling is a bigger boiler is better but if you are just giving this a go and don't want the extra expense I think you'd be ok

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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by Rivvo » Fri May 09, 2014 4:46 pm

I mash with about 20 litres of water then sparge with 8 litres from a separate stockpot, if I got one of these I could just add the mash water in, sparge in my mash tun, then add the lot to the boiler, and for that money it's not much more than the plastic fv and tesco kettle elements I've been toying with trying, someone on the craft brewing forum looked at my figures and told me I was hitting something like 75% efficiency (which i understand isn't too bad)
Good spot, I may have to invest!

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DeadFall
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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by DeadFall » Fri May 09, 2014 8:20 pm

I've just stumped for one of the linked urns to use as a hlt/boiler. I'll update later with the quality of the build.
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FarmerFred

Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by FarmerFred » Sat May 10, 2014 10:49 am

Thanks for the info raiderman, bigger does sound better in this case! I'm glad I linked the tea urn, it will be interesting to see how you get on with it. My birthday is around the corner so might have to put one on my pressie list!

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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by DeadFall » Mon May 12, 2014 12:40 pm

Mine arrived today. It seems ok, a lot lighter than I was expecting, but then I don't have any experience of other boilers. The tap is very small and will need to be enlarged by some means for my 1/2" ss fittings (I'll probably use the grinding stones I successfully used on the lidl jam maker. The body is made from quite thin steel, this is probably why it is cheaper than other options. The lid locks on with a twisting mechanism which secures some tabs under the handles. I haven't tried a boil in it yet, but the dial goes to 110. The destructions say it's not designed for continuous boils, so we'll have to see how that works.

I unscrewed the bottom and the element (2.5k) is a about 15mm in diameter and centrally located. There looks to be enough room to add a bottom drain if so inclined. There's no site glass or markings other than a max line on the inside of the boiler.

It's about 62cm high by 30 cm wide. I've got some pictures, but I'll need to find a way of sharing them as my usual way isn't working right now. So far it feels like a fairly good budget option.
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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by FarmerFred » Mon May 12, 2014 10:41 pm

The urn soon turned up. Be interesting to see how the rolling boil goes and how long it takes to get up to boil. Im going to do a test biab on stove before I invest in one. Keep us updated

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DeadFall
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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by DeadFall » Tue May 13, 2014 12:08 am

FarmerFred wrote:The urn soon turned up. Be interesting to see how the rolling boil goes and how long it takes to get up to boil. Im going to do a test biab on stove before I invest in one. Keep us updated
I'll put the tap on and work in the kitchen for a bit tomorrow and time the boil.

In the mean time:

Image

The weirdness behind the tap is the bubble wrapped power cable.

Image

1/2 inch bsp threaded hosetail compared to the tap.

Image

Couple of dints there, the camera makes them look a lot worse than they are.

Image
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DeadFall
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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by DeadFall » Tue May 13, 2014 12:40 pm

1 hour and 15 minutes to go from 18c to a rolling boil. It held the boil for about 10 minutes and then cut out. I'll take a look when it's cool to see if there's anything obvious I can do to bypass it. This was about 22.5L water, I got distracted by work and lost count, I was filling with 2.5L at a time and it was 8-10 lots

Edit -

There's a button on the bottom that needs to be depressed after the cut out kicks in, obviously this can't be done full boil, so it will need to be bypassed. I'll take a look later.
I filled it to the -full- indicator and then drained into my fv. Looks like the full line is actually 30L making this a bit smaller than advertised, with 35L being the total.
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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by FarmerFred » Tue May 13, 2014 3:21 pm

Cheers for the pics. For the money, doesn't look too bad at all. Seems a little bit cheeky to advertise it as 35l if the fill line is 30, but then again if brimming it goves 35l not too bad. Be interesting to see what can be done in the way of bypassing the switch on bottom. Time for the soldering iron!

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DeadFall
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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by DeadFall » Tue May 13, 2014 3:55 pm

FarmerFred wrote:Cheers for the pics. For the money, doesn't look too bad at all. Seems a little bit cheeky to advertise it as 35l if the fill line is 30, but then again if brimming it goves 35l not too bad. Be interesting to see what can be done in the way of bypassing the switch on bottom. Time for the soldering iron!
It's a simple mechanical pop switch. push the button to reset. I just popped the bottom off and there are two spade connectors attached to it. It should be a case of popping them off, joining them together and wrapping in insulting tape. There's also a fuse there wrapped in a plastic case, I think this is the o-shit fuse apparently this blows on boil dry but I might remove this too.

Image
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Aethelstan

Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by Aethelstan » Tue May 13, 2014 4:44 pm

From the looks of the cut out, it's a carbon rod that will conduct heat from the hot plate and pop the cut out? Might be easier to just ditch the rod? I think I will be getting me one of these on payday.

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DeadFall
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Re: Does anybody know about these tea urns

Post by DeadFall » Tue May 13, 2014 5:11 pm

nah, it's just a bit of plastic. there's a soft plastic tube that acts as a coupler to the actual button, if you look carefully you can see it.
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