stirring stirring that's what I'll be doing on my next brew date because today I'm building a stirrer for my hot liquor tank in my brewing setup now two weeks ago I put together a video showing different temperatures inside the hot liquor tank of my three V homes setup the trouble was at the top of the water it was really hot and down near the bottom where my spice water comes out it was getting really cold about 20 degrees Celsius difference so I thought I need to stir this up and get more homogeneous temperature distribution throughout my hot liquor tank and I said about ordering parts to build my own hot liquor tank stirrer there are a lot of designs out there but this video is about how I've built mine all the parts have arrived now so I'm going to be putting it together this afternoon alright let's get started first of all I want to show you all of the parts I'm going to use for this build and we'll start with the motor and gearbox combination so here's my motor and gearbox together here I'll hold it up close and focus on it it says it's 12 volts change 200 rpm it just focuses there we go I think 200 rpm is going to be good because that means it's spinning around about three times a second or a bit more when it's running at full speed and that's going to be quick enough hopefully that it gets a bit of movement in there but without like spraying and splashing stuff around so so we'll see how that goes next up I have this stirrer here that I purchased off eBay as well these are made for laboratory situations it's made of Teflon coating so it doesn't react with anything and it's good for high temperatures and it's got this little front bit on it that can bend out as well but I don't really need that feature now the trouble was that this has a seven millimeter shaft on it which is bit odd and the mode it's got a six millimeter shaft but thankfully ebay to the rescue they sell these little coupling things here let me just show you inside there without getting too much glare just got a six millimeter hole in one in seven millimeter hole in the other end and a bundle of grub screw so you can couple two shots together it's pretty cheap too that's all going to go together inside an enclosure this is an LP 35 F from poly case you can get these CNC but in this case I'll just use my tools and cut it up as I see fit and it's pretty cool because it's got these little mounting flanges on the bottom and that makes I'll be able to mount it to my lid of my hot liquor tank while it's running so they'll be really cool too and we use season our hunt snakes so that's that's where I got these enclosure idea from and that's going to be run from a 12-volt power adapter and this is a regular one low voltage safe and of course a switch as well so that we can turn it on and off nicely without having it turning on and off at the wall alrighty so I'll get started cutting up my enclosure this motor and gearbox these kind of fit down in the middle now on the front of it I'm going to have my nice on-off switch mounted somewhere in this wall and then on the back I'll have my power jack going in there so the power can come in out of the way on the back those wires are all soldered in now we've got our power coming in now we've switched our positive not that it matters all going to the motor and I'll just drop this guy in nicely in the middle there I'm just screwing it together now it fits quite nicely plenty of spare space I guess the why is there a bit bunched up but it'll be fine I miss this part while I was putting it together when I hooked it up and tested it on my hot liquor tank and it got very hot I noticed that some oil had started dripping out through the shaft a little bit and that would get into my brewing water so that'd be no good so in this step I'm going to take apart the gearbox and empty out all of that oil as best as I can here is the inside of my gearbox and you can see all of the gears in there they just covered in some kind of thick oil or grease and I'm going to try and clean that off by washing it in some detergent just taking out the pieces bit by bit try to clean them up in a tissue here to get off all of that thick gunky oil and then I'll finish them off inside my detergent okay so that's the fourth gear he's all pretty clean now and that's the main one because he sees where all the oil was leaking out from underneath here and of course I've got to clean out this here and get all the oil off here as much as I can and that's also where all the oil is leaking down through there well clean I have finished cleaning up all the gears now and I'm going to put this gearbox back together okay now I've got a drill my precious lid put some holes in it so that I can mount this on top all right that's the lid drilled and I'm going to put this on with some of these bolts that I had laying around I think they're m4 and I'm going to need to make a space of it that holds this nicely above the lid here so I'm going to design something in CAD and I'll 3d print that out what I've got is a flat surface where it's going to mount on top and then a bit of a curve here because my lid isn't entirely flattening if I had this flat the dome if the lid would mean it wouldn't sit properly so just having this curve here helps it to sit more securely as well and I'll just show you a 3d render of that that's that's kind of what it's going to look like I'll have two of these and that's going to sit on top of my of my lid here is the 3d printer about to begin the print job awesome and here is the end product - lovely orange spaces okay so fast-forward a little I printed off these two plastic spaces and you're going to go into here I've attached on my sharps coupler onto the motor and there we go we have firmly attached our stir it to the lid okay back in the brew room and I've just got to work out what lengths I'm gonna have to chop off this stirrer in order to make it fit so I'll probably just have it about there I think and so I'll put a mark where my fingers are and that's gonna line up pretty well with the shaft coupler okay now here we are in the tool shed I put a mark on where I've got to slice it and I'm going to use a hacksaw but I can't hold the camera and hacksaw at the same time so we're just going to cut ahead to the bit where this is already done alright so here it is that's the Stara mounted on top of my lead there into the hot liquor tank lovely like a dream just sits in there sort of around the side near the heater there and behind the hemp oil it can actually sit anywhere around behind the Holmes coil so alright my build is complete and today I'm in the brew room and it's time to test you out this hot liquor tank stirrup see if it works I've got it here with me and honestly I've got to say I'm starting to have second thoughts about this little stir on the edge here because it's kind of small and it doesn't spin that fast is it gonna be enough to have modernize all the temperatures in there it's only one way to find out let's get started step one we gotta fill er up with cold water step2 got to put on the lid and start the stirrer and step three is to turn on the heater and set it up to strike temperature I'm setting it at 72 degrees and now we're here okay here you can see we've reached seventy two point eight degrees Celsius which is point eight above our set point now previously without the stirrer in the hot liquor tank we were getting around 1.7 degrees above our set point and we'll see how high it goes this time before it starts going back down and there we have it so it's gone back down point one that means our overshoot was only point eight degrees Celsius this time so that's a great improvement over what we had before without any stirring going on in there okay now here is the real test that we've been working towards I'm going to turn up the stirrer take off the lid and we're going to see how well this heat has been for mojo nosed around in the hot liquor tank now last time we had huge temperature variations here we should see around 72 degrees because I'm measuring right at the end of our temperature probe and we're still at seventy two point four there there we go about 73 degrees Celsius and if I move this one down now the bottom near where my sponge what it comes out looks like we're about 74 75 degrees there so last time we had about a 20 degree difference where were 20 degrees below the temperature we set out and here we're about two degrees above so that's an order of magnitude better just having that slight stirring that was going on down here and you wouldn't even see the movement in the water here but it's just enough to keep everything moving inside and I'm very happy with that awesome so this little thing here was able to not only improve the response of my temperature controller but also to homogenize the temperatures throughout my hot liquor tank which is great because anytime I want to add water to my mash safe or strike water or infusions or post biting at the end I'm going to be putting in water at exactly the temperature or very close to the temperature that it says on my temperature controller all thanks to this little stirrer here so this is a useful little kit that you can build yourself I'm gonna put down the links at the bottom of this video for anyone that wants to build their own and add this to their own hot liquor tank so until next time happy brewing