Foo Monkey Hoo Haw

The Water System
One of the most important ingrediants in any beverage is water. This
is expecially the case for beer as any impurities in the water could
ruin its desired taste. A great deal of money can be spent trying to
get perfect water, but like many things in engineering, there is a
cost/benefit tradeoff. When Dan and I were considering what hardware
to use for the water system, we wanted to design a system that
provided good quality water, while not being to expensive. Once again
morebeer.com had at least a
partial solution. They have some water filtration hardware that was of
interest. inparticular, a reverse osmosis filter and an activated
charcoal filter. However, while the reverse osmosis filter does do a
better job filtering, it's also expensive. Dan also felt that the AC
filter would do an adequate job of removing the major impurities that
were most likely to effect water quality.

The other key to having a good water system is to have as much
capacity as possible. The brew reactor we're considering is a 5 gallon
system. We need enough water to be able to fill the hot water tank
(called the hot liquor tank) fill the mash tun/latter tun, provide
adequate cleaning solution, etc. We decided on using two connected 55
gallon food grade plastic drums as they are not too expensive and
provide more than adequate volume. A local homebrew supply store also
happens to have these barrels in stock. The primary drum will contain two
floater switches, one place at the top of the drum and one placed 1/5
the way from the bottom. The top floater switch will turn on an
electromechanical valve that connects our main water line to the
activated charcoal filter if the water level is below the height of
the switch. Thus the system will always be trying to refill itself if
it's below maximal capacity. The second floater switch near the bottom
will act as an emergency notification signal in the event that the
system is nearly out of water as we don't want the pumps to run dry.
All of the pumps that we will be using aren't self priming (as it's
cheaper that way) and thus having them run dry might burn their motors
out. Dan and I are trying to decide if we can get away with using a
standard RainBird EM valve instead of a more expensive one for the water
inlet. The RainBird valve is made of PVC which would add chlorine to
the system, but the AC filter would catch this added chlorine. However,
this could burn out the filter faster. The question is how much faster.
In any case, a diagram of the system we have in mind can be found

here.