49 replies to this topic

[3rd party JKor]

Wow, expensive toy, but you'll have fun playing with it.

eBay. $30 + ship.

It looks like it operates on the same principle as a hot wire anemometer. Are you having shop calibrated for CO2 at your expected temperature and pressure, or will you apply correction factors?I will look forward to hearing about your results.

Yes, similar. I'll be using correction factors.

[MolBasser]

BrewBasser, isn't CO2 also released in sterol synthesis? And also in the metabolism of amino acids? People can use CO2 as a guide to how much the gravity has dropped, but I'm not certain that it is entirely from the EMP pathway. When looking at Fix's Principles in Brewing Science p. 96 I see a CO2 coming out of the transformation of mevalonic acid to squalene. Admittedly I don't know much about that reaction other than it takes energy from the yeast cells to do it, but it does look like 1 CO2 molecule is a by product. In Brewing they mention something on p. 332 about an aldehyde and a CO2 being the by-product of amino acid metabolism. Just curious what that's all about.

This is true, there are other reactions that produce CO2, however they are insignificant compared to the production of CO2 through fermentation.You won't be able to measure to the precise molar value of concentrations, but it will certainly be close enough.BrewBasser

[3rd party JKor]

I got my flowmeter from the eBay seller. He accidentally (I think) sent me two flowmeters, instead of one. I'll have to set this up for my next brew. Results will be flowing in shortly. (haha, get it? "flowing", I crack me up)

Edited by JKoravos, 10 June 2009 - 06:44 PM.

[stellarbrew]

I got my flowmeter from the eBay seller. He accidentally (I think) sent me two flowmeters, instead of one. I'll have to set this up for my next brew. Results will be flowing in shortly. (haha, get it? "flowing", I crack me up)

Having two of them allows you to check one against the other. Although, if they didn't give consistent results, then what would you do?

[3rd party JKor]

Having two of them allows you to check one against the other. Although, if they didn't give consistent results, then what would you do?

Cry?No, j/k, I have one at work that I can check it against.

[Patrick C.]

A couple of guys did this a few years ago and posted about it on the B&V board. Check out-https://hbd.org/disc...0001/20544.htmlThere was also discussion on the HBD about it. Google "bubble counter" on hbd.org and you should find some good reading. There were several threads about it, but the search function there kind of sucks and "bubble counter" became a running joke for a while so it pops up in unrelated threads. Ken A. posted a link to a graph in the thread above, but it's a dead link now. He hasn't posted in a while IIRC, but he used to be pretty active on the B&V and the Green Board. I started to say that you should e-mail him, but it's an Adelphia.net address.

[3rd party JKor]

LOL...bubble counter. That's a little too wacked out for me. I'll stick with the flowmeter. There was some interesting general discussion about monitoring the CO2, though. Thanks for the heads up. Here's a plot I found of 'bubble rate'

[MolBasser]

Why laugh at bubble counter?The people collected relevant data and put it in graphical form. Bubbles are flow meters. Collecting the data sucked I bet, but it is legit.BrewBasser

[3rd party JKor]

Why laugh at bubble counter?The people collected relevant data and put it in graphical form. Bubbles are flow meters. Collecting the data sucked I bet, but it is legit.BrewBasser

I'm not saying it's not legit. It's a very creative solution to measuring CO2 flowrate, especially the way the guy did it, with a microphone taped to the airlock. It's probably accurate enough to get a general idea of gravity et al, but I'm sure there's pretty significant error in the data. Too many things are interacting to get a really accurate CO2 quantity number from that data.

[Patrick C.]

Collecting the data sucked I bet

Sounds like a job for grad students