The "conditions" were I made an offer if I want to keep it, and to record how I get on with it. The latter might be of interest to others, so here's how the testing has started out:guypettigrew wrote: ↑Sun May 12, 2019 3:29 pmNo Tilt? Want to borrow mine? I don't find it at all helpful!
PM me if you'd like to try it out.
Guy
The hardest bit was getting Excel to draw that graph! I'm a bit of a nonk when it comes to some of Excel's smarter features.
The brew was a 21L batch of DIYDog Zeitgueit, a dark lager, actually the first "lager" I've ever attempted (in 45 years of brewing!). It's been brewed in a Grainfather ("no sparge") and is being fermented in a Grainfather Conical employing a shelf cooler to keep the temperature down to 12C. I'm running in parallel with my old method of thieving samples to test with a refractometer (along with using the temperatures displayed by the GF Conical).
Firstly temperature: This is the dotted lines on the graph, blue indicates the manual readings and red the Tilt readings. At first sight the readings seem to agree, except there is a bit of a lag with the Tilt registering the initial fall in temperature (I kept the wort warm for the first four hours before dropping the temperature to lager ferment temperatures). The Tilt is probably correct because it is reading in the middle at the surface, not at the bottom on the side like the GF (which cools with a jacket on the sides, and cooled wort will initially circulate downwards). But thereafter all the Tilt reading except one are 11.7C. This suggest something dodgy, probable in the Tilt's software. But even at a "fixed" 11.7C reading it is still within 0.5C of the GF, and perhaps the GF can maintain the temperature within 0.1C? Yeah, like heck it can. Still, not much of an issue. The Tilt software would not allow calibration, although instructions suggest it will - but calibration wasn't needed so didn't matter.
Next, gravity: The Tilt had been calibrated in plain water and again to match OG (the Tilt initially registered 1.040 which was adjusted so it read 1.048 as measured). The first big concern here was the delay before the Tilt registered a fall. The refractometer was registering a fall, the airlock was bubbling, but it was 12-24 hours later before the Tilt budged. And the discrepancy continued yet if it was calibration I'd expect the two sets of readings to converge at least. When taking readings it was not possible to take a snap reading; you needed to wait for a reading that made sense (displayed more than once) as the readings would skip about, possibly as CO2 clung to the Tilt for a moment skewing the readings by 3-5 point. Searching the Internet suggests I'm not the only one experiencing reading that wont stay still, or else seem to "stick".
My review of a Tilt hasn't gone too well for starters! But this is only the first try.
(EDIT 09/06/2019: I didn't know when I first started writing this, but the Tilt I had appeared to be faulty! See later for details and I'll start this review again with a replacement unit).