I used the 5Gal Menards-branded water cooler that they sell for $10 after rebate a few times a year.czubak wrote:I need to see if any of my coolers would work to heat strike/sparge. I think that would be more efficient. I use an old turkey fryer pot from my extract days. I worked great for strike, but for sparge I needed to add a flame to get it to temp within an hour.andrewmaixner wrote:Used it to heat my mash-out water in a cooler (5gal at about 125F-->175F) during my 1 hour mash. Worked well. Would have used it to heat my strike water but I was in a hurry that morning.
~5 gallons in my 10 gallon kettle or 70qt cooler won't allow the element to reach the water.
If you are going to immersion-heat the strike water in your boil kettle, you could wrap a natural fiber blanket, or that silver stuff people put around mash tun keggles, around it to retain heat better.
I just adjusted my strike volume up so that a 5Gal sparge would hit my desired volume -- with all the full-volume-no-sparge and BIAB stuff people do nowadays, it's pretty much proven that a high water/grain ratio doesn't matter as long as you have the right pH and temperature.
I remembered that I also threw the anova in my strike water heating kettle, on the propane burner, for faster heating and easy temperature measurement. This thing is handy.
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