Boiler lagging

We have two boilers in our brewing set up: the first one I bought is an old five gallon Burco that I got on eBay. We now use this purely as a hot liquor tank (hot water to non-brewers!) because I also have a Brupaks beer boiler which is used for actually boiling the beer.

These boilers run for several hours on brew day. The Burco probably runs for 2 hours (on and off) and the Brupaks boiler for a similar time, depending on how long the recipe requires the wort to be boiled for.

That’s quite a bit of electricity, given that the Burco pulls 2.5kW and the Brupaks boiler 2kW.

So on brew day I reckon we must burn about 9 units of electricity, which at 13.5p per unit will cost us about £1.20.

So I popped down to B&Q and bought some reflective radiator insulation – the stuff you slide behind your radiator to bounce the heat back into the room. A pair of scissors, a load of gaffer tape and some sticky Velcro later, we have two lovely jackets for our boilers that come on and off as required. During the boil we are looking to hold as much heat in as possible (this allows us to maintain a better rolling boil too), but as soon as we start chilling the wort we can whip the jacket off to allow faster heat loss.

We made them with two sheets of radiator insulation back to back, which is why they are shiny on both the inside and outside (which is not entirely clear from the photos below).

Oh, one last thing. If you look at the Burco jacket you’ll see that we have cut a small window in it to expose the side of the Burco. Why? So that we can use our infrared thermometer to get an accurate temperature reading from the wall of the vessel!