I bought a Cip ball to clean in place my conical fermenter. Got all the tubes etc. Got a 1/5 hp sump pump as well as a bucket heater to heat the liquid PBW. Things were going great on the test run and I was running hot PBW through the CIP ball/fermenter. Decided to do a 30 minute trial and did some other things. At 15 minutes my pump stopped. Went over and looked and it was completely burned out. The water temperature was 140. After a little research it turns out the sump pump max temperature is about 120. So question is, aside from buying a expensive nano pump, how are people running hot cleaner through their CIP without burning out their pumps?
I don’t use water over 120°.
Got it, guess I will send back that bucket heater.
It’ll have a plastic impeller, but a basic homebrew pump would run ~$120 and you could also use it for sanitizing, wort transfer, etc.
Not all CIP balls will run with the low flow rates of homebrew pumps.
Just an update, just use my CIP ball for my fermenter for the first time post fermentation.
It worked fantastic. Clean shining stainless steel when I was done without any residue.
For those interested, here was the set up. 1/2 inch braided silicone tubing to the CIP. 1 inch silicone tubing from the dump valve back into the bucket. 3/4 inch silicone tubing from the sampling port back to the bucket. I used a 1/4 sump pump in a small bucket.
I First dump the remaining yeast. Then I ran hot tap water from the bucket through the CIP back into the bucket for about 15 minutes. I dump this and ran hot PBW for about 15 minutes, dumped it and repeated it for another 15 minutes. Then I ran a couple hot water rinses. Well doing this I cleaned all of the small parts and had a beer and was able to do a lot of other things. Saved a lot of time. When I was done I opened up the fermenter and it was perfectly shiny stainless steel. I checked around with a clean paper towel to see if there is any residual yeast or residue in there was absolutely none. Infinitely better than my old way of cleaning.
Cheers