Cheap homebuilt water jacket bottler

[RileySugarbush]

This is a 16 qt syrup pot nested in a 20 qt water jacket pot. I don't have any syrup yet, so I can't say how well it works, but the thermostat holds it well at 190°F. Total cost was about $80.

http://www.mapletrader.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=3106&stc=1&d=1300513912


Valve, fittings, thermostat and light from $2 garage sale coffee maker.
$11 1440W hot water heater element
$39 for a set of four cheap stainless stock pots on eBay with lids, largest two used here.
A probe thermometer I had laying around
Some half inch baltic birch plywood
Various brass fittings and fasteners from the hardware store
.



Here is a view with the syrup container removed:

http://www.mapletrader.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=3107&stc=1&d=1300514194


Here is the wiring. White wires are 120V from black cord to element and thermostat. The thermostat is bolted to a piece of copper and soldered to th bottom of the water jacket. Yellow wires go to the indicator light, not shown.

http://www.mapletrader.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=3108&stc=1&d=1300514742


And here is the bottom of the syrup pot. 7/8" hole in bottom of pot with a 1" copper pipe cap soldered over it on the bottom so the pot fully drains. 9/16" hole in cap to fit over sealed fitting to the bottling valve.

http://www.mapletrader.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=3109&stc=1&d=1300515217

[3rdgen.maple]

Looks pretty slick to me. The only thing that I can think of is that I think you would be better off with the thermostat reading the syrup temp and not the water temp. The water will be up to temp long before the syrup will.

[RileySugarbush]

Yes I agree with that! We will have a digital thermometer for the syrup, and this one had a 1/2" pipe thread that was easy to put through one wall but would have been really hard to go through two.

We filter straight of the evaporator into our bottler and bottle right away, so adding hot syrup to this should be OK.

This is replacing a pot with a bottling valve on a hot plate. That always had hot spots you could hear boiling, making a bit of niter. I'm looking forward to the improvement.

[3rdgen.maple]

Very good then. I have a water jacket canner on the list for net year along with a filter press for upgrades.

[Dan W]

Riley, Very nice job. I have a somewhat homebuilt W J canner and love it.

[SilverLeaf]

Very nice! A couple weeks ago I picked up the parts for a similar setup. Just haven't gotten the time to put it together yet.

[SilverLeaf]

Been meaning to post these photos for awhile to share my experience. Here's my contraption, for anyone thinking of doing something similar. Definitely not as slick as RileySugarbush's! But it's usable.

I initially wanted this to be as inexpensive as possible, so I took what I had on hand:

hotplate
thermometers


and then bought the bare minimum I thought I'd need:

16qt and 20qt stainless steel stock pots ($8 each at Cub Foods)
stainless steel nipple (3/8" pipe), ball valve, & elbow (approx $35 total)


My big weakness is that I don't have any welding or soldering skills and I just didn't feel comfortable wasting time and money experimenting, so I opted to instead go to the local weld shop and cough up a little dough for what I thought would be peace of mind. I ran this idea by them and they thought it was feasible (although, as you'll see below, they may not have been the most up front about that...!). Then, once I had my parts, they tig welded it and in the end the labor came to $60.

So my total I put into it was $103.


Here she is! It's basically one stock pot sitting inside the other, and the whole thing sits on the hot plate. I quickly learned, though, that if I'm heating syrup up from room temp, the hot plate is too weak and it takes forever to get up to bottling temp. My solution to that is to heat it up on the big burner on my stove and then transfer to the hot plate once it's basically at temp. A little tricky, yes (heavy! and hot), but do-able. The hotplate has plenty of juice to hold the thing at a steady temp.
5704 (click on the pictures to open a bigger version)

I stick a candy thermometer in the water jacket part so I have an idea what temp the water is, and then I have a digital thermometer probe that I dangle in the syrup. You can also see in this view the little rods the weld shop welded to the pots to hold them together and stablilize them. (What you can't see is that they also took some scrap metal they had laying around and welded it to the bottom of the inside pot so that the weight of that pot would be fully supported. I think the inside pot bottom is 2 inches above the bottom of the outside pot.)
5705

Here's the inside. Mine doesn't drain near as nice as Riley's; You can see where the nipple was cut off and welded to the pot. When push came to shove the weld shop was a little nervous about being able to get a good bead around the pipe if we had it flush with the bottom of the inside pot, so we settled on it being 1/4 inch up. The downside is that, to fully drain it, I have to tip the whole contraption. Not a huge deal, but hot scalding water does dribble out of the water jacket part once I tip beyond a certain point, so that's something I have to take into account - I've learned to do that whole part over the sink.
5706

And here's where things got ugly... literally. This is what didn't work out so well. I don't know what guage my cheap SS pots came in (20? 22?) but it's pretty thin stuff. And so very risky for welding (even tig welding). If I had to do it over again I would spring for more $$ for heavier duty pots. What happened was that everything welded fine and I took it all home, but soon discovered that the bead holding the pipe to the outside pot had a small leak. So I brought it back to the weld shop, and in trying to fix it they made it worse - it's very easy for the welder to burn a hole right through the stuff. So what you see here is the patch job that they put together to fix the hole they made in my outside pot. And you can see how the steel warped pretty good in the process. And the big bummer is, in the end, the thing still leaks! Not much - just maybe 2 drops per minute, so it's still usable. I just have to keep dabbing the water off.
5707

In the end, am I happy with it? Yes. It sure beats what I was doing before (funnel into the bottle) and I definitely am finding that it prevents the build up of extra niter during the bottle process. But it's definitely a clunkier contraption than I had hoped, so in a few years I'll probably be looking for a new & improved version...

[Springfield Acer]

I am curious about how the WJ canner worked out for Rileysugarbush but his message box is full. Does anybody know this member to get him a message to give us an update?