seth8530
The Atomic Wine Maker
So, a few months ago I purchased my first wine pump. The guy is rated for 45 PSI so he is no slouch for the apartment level winemaker. A few months later I decided to purchase myself a plate filter.
http://morewinemaking.com/products/plate-filter.html
http://morewinemaking.com/products/selfpriming-diaphragm-pump.html
So, like any person who receives a new toy in the mail I wanted to test it out. Fortunately, my first experiment involved only waters because my first experiment resulted in water spraying out at high pressure from the filters gasket... It seems the pressure was a bit too high.
After doing some asking around it was brought to my attention that one of the ways you can control flow and thus pressure is by using a re-circulation line on the outlet end of my pump. I will not get into the rather complicated discussion of why it works, but for now lets just take it for granted that increasing the cross-sectional area that the the fluid can travel down will decrease line pressure.
So, we know that adding an additional line ( and thus more flow area) will decrease the flow pressure, but what do you do if you want to control the flow pressure? Well, in that case you control the area!
My method of doing this involved taking one of those garden hose split things with the little switch valve that lets you choose which hose you want to have water flow in and using the valves on it to control just how large of a flow area my lines would see.
As you can see from the above image I managed to make a fairly fun looking plumbing contraption. The valve on the left goes towards my filter and the valve on the right is my recirc line which goes back into my carboy. The part that makes things happen is the flow splitter. All the rest of the stuff is just meant to make everything connect together.
The way I operated the setup was by starting the pump in recirc mode. Thus, I closed the valve to the filter and fully opened the valve to the recirc line. Once a good flow had been established I opened my filter line full open. This caused the pressure to drop significantly in the loop. Then to raise the pressure to give me a better flow rate to the filter I slowly and slightly closed the recirc line valve until I reached the max pressure the filter could handle.
Here you can see the general setup with water since a picture is worth a million words....
And here is the setup working with some of my brother's beer. We used his beer since I care more about my wine than his beer. Originally we thought that we had managed to filter out the hop aroma from the beer but it turned out that we just had a bit of water left in the line from the filter.
The towels were needed since the filter leaks when the pressure gets too high so I had to use something to protect the floor a bit.
Cheers
Seth
http://morewinemaking.com/products/plate-filter.html
http://morewinemaking.com/products/selfpriming-diaphragm-pump.html
So, like any person who receives a new toy in the mail I wanted to test it out. Fortunately, my first experiment involved only waters because my first experiment resulted in water spraying out at high pressure from the filters gasket... It seems the pressure was a bit too high.
After doing some asking around it was brought to my attention that one of the ways you can control flow and thus pressure is by using a re-circulation line on the outlet end of my pump. I will not get into the rather complicated discussion of why it works, but for now lets just take it for granted that increasing the cross-sectional area that the the fluid can travel down will decrease line pressure.
So, we know that adding an additional line ( and thus more flow area) will decrease the flow pressure, but what do you do if you want to control the flow pressure? Well, in that case you control the area!
My method of doing this involved taking one of those garden hose split things with the little switch valve that lets you choose which hose you want to have water flow in and using the valves on it to control just how large of a flow area my lines would see.
As you can see from the above image I managed to make a fairly fun looking plumbing contraption. The valve on the left goes towards my filter and the valve on the right is my recirc line which goes back into my carboy. The part that makes things happen is the flow splitter. All the rest of the stuff is just meant to make everything connect together.
The way I operated the setup was by starting the pump in recirc mode. Thus, I closed the valve to the filter and fully opened the valve to the recirc line. Once a good flow had been established I opened my filter line full open. This caused the pressure to drop significantly in the loop. Then to raise the pressure to give me a better flow rate to the filter I slowly and slightly closed the recirc line valve until I reached the max pressure the filter could handle.
Here you can see the general setup with water since a picture is worth a million words....
And here is the setup working with some of my brother's beer. We used his beer since I care more about my wine than his beer. Originally we thought that we had managed to filter out the hop aroma from the beer but it turned out that we just had a bit of water left in the line from the filter.
The towels were needed since the filter leaks when the pressure gets too high so I had to use something to protect the floor a bit.
Cheers
Seth
