Saturday 23 April 2011

Look What I Found

Whilst visiting one of my customers last week I came upon a rather sad looking tea urn that had failed its PAT test due to a nick in the cable. The care home I was visiting were going to chuck it out so for a small donation to the residents fund I had a 27L boiler I could turn into a copper.


Luckily the nick in the cable was near the end so it wasn't a tough job to pull the cable through into the housing, cut it, and re connect it. Having done that it was a pretty simple job to replace the tap assembly with a tank connector and ball valve.


I also had some 15mm compression fittings to push fit 90 degree adapters so I used those. I had been thinking about utilising a hop sack instead of a hop stopper but after some good advice from those at The Home Brew Forum I bored out the tank connector with a dremel so that the hop stopper could be accepted and connected it through the tank connector and onto the ball valve. I'm sorry but I forgot to take a pic of this.


Then it was simply a matter of drilling rows of 2mm holes in the underside of the stopper, tightening everything up and giving it a boil test. With its 3kW element I'm pleased to say that it passed with flying colours so it is just a matter of doing a brew with it tomorrow to see how we get on. 


I've given the inside a bit of a clean but haven't bothered with the outside because I plan to wrap some insulation around it.