SSP
plates:
Italian
plates:
Winegrowers Supplies
- Internal Cooling Plates, Snakes or Coils, to cool the fermenting
juice
SSP
plates:
Italian
plates:
The plates are installed into
lids of variable capacity tanks; ½" holes need to be drilled in the
lid, at 150 mm c-c. No welding is needed.
Inlet/outlet both have ½" male threads, with an adaptor this can be increased to
¾"
after installation.
Maximum operating pressure is 2.0 bar. Two plates can be fitted to one tank lid,
for greater cooling.
The additional weight of a plate is such that a small winch may be necessary to lower and raise the tank lid; hand-operated winches are available from many sources, e.g. the TW1200 at £19.98 + vat from http://www.machinemart.co.uk/shop/categories/search/hand-electric-winches.
Mounting fittings: you can use 
¾" hexagon male-thread with ½" inner female thread @ £6 each, with
a stainless steel nut (½" bsp internal thread) fitted on the threaded
part of the s/s tube inside the tank lid; tightening the
top fitting down would fix the lid. One or two large s/s washers and an O-ring
would make a complete seal. A stainless steel ½" bsp bolt could be
used in place of the above fitting, to seal the hole after the cooling plate is removed.
With 2 cooling plates it is worth fitting a strengthening/bracing sheet to increase the rigidity of the lid.
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Italian plates: 370 mm wide
x |
SSP plates are more expensive: |
Cooling Plate vs Cooling Coil: Cooling plates are more efficient due to greater surface area/volume ratio. There is a mistaken belief that plates are inherently more prone to leak than coils. This is based on the false belief that coils are seamless. Stainless steel coils have a welded seam.
The cooling liquid can be cold water. For a much more
efficient method then a closed circuit system using a glycol (antifreeze)
solution recycled through a heat exchanger, enables the water-mixture to be
cooled to a much lower temperature. A low speed pump is needed for circulation,
with controllable flow rate to enable the temperature of the fermenting juice to
be adjusted.
The ideal is, once the fermentation has started, to reduce the juice temperature to
just below 10 °C, which should enable the fermentation to last 3 to 4 weeks.
Tartrate crystals precipitate on the plates but these would precipitate anyway, during the winter, on the tank walls.
Tank thermometer: including probe and fitting, needs a 17mm hole to be drilled in the tank, 46 Euros
Cooling Snakes: an alternative to cooling plates, the advantage being that the tank lid doesn't have to be modified, you just feed the snake through the air lock hole so that it hangs vertically down. It can also be used with fixed capacity tanks or wood barrels:-
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0.6 metres long, 0.11 square metres, 143 Euros |
This tube-within-a-tube snake is used to circulate cold water or glycol solution through fermenting juice to reduce the temperature. An inner vinyl tube runs through the middle of the flexible/corrugated stainless steel tube, but is shorter than the stainless steel tube. The cold water or glycol solution is run into one tube and out through the other.
The inlet and outlet have ½" bsp threads, one male and one female. They can be adapted to ¾" male in order to use normal hose-tails for 13mm or 19mm tubing.
Heat Exchanger coils
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Stainless steel (Aisi 304, V2A) tubular spiral, ¾":- 0.6 square metres, 270 mm diameter, 600 mm high, 281 Euros Cooling/heating temperature controller:- 196 Euros |
