e-Vaporator

[Jeff01]

I am seriously looking into building this evaporator Fyreaway. I have drawn up some plans and a friend is going to help weld it. Do you have any upgrades since your last post? Did you see an improvement in the evap rate after adding the insulation?

Thanks in advance.
Jeff

[Fyreaway]

...Do you have any upgrades since your last post? Did you see an improvement in the evap rate after adding the insulation? Jeff

Yep, the insulation helps a lot. My most spectacular upgrade was due to a spectacular failure. It seems that it's pretty important to have the electrical connections well isolated before sliding in the piece of foil lined bubble wrap. Luckily I only contacted one leg of the 220v connection so it was not life changing but still a harsh wake-up call. This is a pretty simple machine and you should be able to get away with a minimal investment to see if it works for you. The PID controller I use is mostly to give me something to fiddle with while I'm boiling. You could very well just plug the thing in and unplug when you're done.

[Jeff01]

Definitely need to respect 220 volts. I found an element enclosure on one of the brewing websites. It covers the terminals and adds a ground connection as well. Thanks for the tip on the PID controller. I think I’ll just wire it up straight and add the PID next year. Running out of time here, I drilled some test holes today and have sap flowing. I hope to have the evaporator set up and ready to go by the end of the week.

[Lucky Dog]

This is a great thread, thanks!

For those of us that don't understand electrical things, could you explain what the PID controller is and what it does?

[Cedar Eater]

This is a great thread, thanks!

For those of us that don't understand electrical things, could you explain what the PID controller is and what it does?

PID controllers are pretty versatile. Instead of just on or off like a switch, they read an input temperature (or pressure, flow, whatever) and adjust the output power. So if you have an oven on a PID controller it would apply full power until the temperature gets up near the setpoint and then it would back the output power off to a trickle to prevent or minimize the temperature overshoot. Then if you open the door on the oven, it would see the temperature dropping and try to pull it back up. In the case of boiling sap, you would set the setpoint at the boiling point of water, but if the boil was too vigorous (more power than the amount of sap needs to have ), you could back it down some.

[Lucky Dog]

Thank you Cedar Eater.