Post by gjhinesjr on Jul 19, 2018 17:45:50 GMT -5
Hey gang,
I just picked up some cool jugs that I wanted to share with everyone, as they're a bit outside the norm. Now if you'll indulge me, there's a bit of a back story. Should you like to skip ahead, feel free, I'll mark it accordingly.
Backstory and Discussion:
So for the past year or more I've been thinking about this milk cooling dilemma. There's ready made options like the Milkplan bulktanks sold by Hamby, Partsdept, and Bobwhite. But those are a decent amount of cash, and further, it just bugs me that they're so expensive for what they are. Most of us don't need to meet 3A standards (although it's a nice goal standard). Additionally I've loved the idea of using a chest freezer, but it comes with it's own challenges.
So I've been pretty set/obsessed with the idea of using a chest freezer full of liquid, as a cooling medium for a long time. Originally, I was going to try to "build" my own budget bulk tank out of a chest freezer. I found a site called "usedstainlesssteelbarrrels.com" that sells all manner of interesting SS containers. I thought I'd drop a 15, 20, 30 gallon SS drum into a chest freezer, maybe right up my own mixing motor and paddle and voila. But for all my efforts, I had a hard time solving a couple problems:
Problem 1: How to remove the milk from large storage container. In a bulk tank, it has a conveniently located valve on the bottom for dispensing. In a chest freezer, you cant drill through the side (in order to connect to an outlet on the bottom of your SS container) because you risk hitting a coolant line and instantly turning your chest freezer into a big paperweight...or cooler. Now I've drawn a lot of inspiration from the DIY beer brewers. That community is very large (much bigger than the home milkers) and yet they have many of the same needs we do, like keeping everything sanitary, excessive cleaning, cooling/heating, etc. So what those guys do is add "collars" to their chest freezers so that they can pass plumbing/electrical lines through. I wont get into it much but if you search it you'll find what I'm talking about.
Problem 2: Problem 2 ties a bit into Problem 1. But Problem 2 is how to keep the milk stirred in a bulk container. Traditionally they use paddles. Now I can go over to any supplier, grab myself a gear motor (something that turns at 35rpm-ish) and mount it to the top of the chest freezer. But then I have to find/make a stainless steel paddle and shaft. The shaft is relatively easy, but the paddle proved hard to find, so I'd be looking at making one. Then you'd still have the dilemma of how to properly seal the shaft hole in the chest freezer. I looked at doing this a few different ways but ultimately lost interest as this became one problem of many.
So for a while I thought, why don't I get a small circulation pump, and put it inside the freezer, and run the supply tube from the milk container in the freezer, back into itself? That would allow me to keep the milk contantly stirred, but also have a pump available for dispensing the milk out of the large container into bottles for consumption. The pump would mount above the freezers liquid level on one of the DIY collars I talked about earlier. And since the whole assembly would be inside the chest freezer, the milk that was coming out of the milk container and getting pumped, would still be kept cold. THE ONLY issue with this is that circulation pumps that are sanitary stainless steel are not designed to pull suction. They are a centrifugal style pump. Which means that since the pump would have to sit above the milk, I'd have to prime it every single time I wanted to use it, or more so, everytime I totally emptied the milk container. So I decided against it. Although, there's still real merit in the idea IMO.
Additionally, I eventually want my whole cleaning process to be completely automatic (something for which I have a SUPER COOL idea I'm gonna start working on this winter, that is going to...blow...your...minds...but I digress). And the idea of manually having to clean a bulk tank is just not working for me.
Ok so that's about where the idea of replicating a bulk tank with a chest freezer ended. So I went back to the idea of using the chest freezer as a "new age" spring box. Since that's exactly what it is, right. In the old days, they'd take the 10 gallon cans of milk, put them in a "box" of some kind with cold spring water that flooded the box and cooled the milk containers. The chest freezer is doing exactly that, only it uses a compressor to keep the liquid cool, instead of bringing in fresh spring water. So after much lamenting I figured, if I'm a small producer, why not just embrace being small and do what they did. So that's where I'm at right now.
So, in a previous thread last year I showed how to calculate the BTU's of heat that your milk contains, and how to calculate the BTU's of cooling fluid the chest freezer needs to contain to effectively cool your milk down to sub 40F in the required time frame. So I know how much cooling fluid I'll need (meaning, I know how big of a chest freezer I'll need). Now a little while back I decided to try to calculate how FAST that process was going to happen. This was an interesting journey because it took me into thermodynamic physics and all that. After a few days, a few spreadsheets, I discovered that if I used Fourier's Law (which is the Thermal Conduction equation) I can calculate how fast those BTU's of heat energy will transfer, from my milk, through my stainless steel vessel, and into my freezers cooling liquid. The problem I discovered, is that like much of physics, the equation shows you how fast heat transfers, given all the variables remain the same. It does not tell you how fast the TEMPERATURE changes. But again, we can easily related BTU's to Temperature so that became inconsequential. HOWEVER...what did become evident (and this was after consulting with my father who is an engineer who told me "god that's all thermodynamics, and I barely passed that class 30 years ago" (soooo way to go dad, big help). Anyhow, what became evident is that apparently, when trying to calculate stuff like I am in the real world, accurate models have to be computer generated because you have to take into account fluid densities, the shape of the container, etc etc etc. And apparently when industry has to figure it out, you literally can not calculate it. So I decided that was all there was gonna be on that.
BUTTT, what I did learn from Fourier's Law is that the SPEED of heat transfer is basically ONLY due to 3 things: The temperature difference between the two fluids, the thickness of the container, and the thermal conductivity of the containers material. Which is super exciting right!?
So this led to 2 new thoughts: 1) If I could generate super cooling fluid in the freezer (by mixing it with food grade glycol) and lower the freezing point of the fluid down to say, -20F (Which a chest freezer will hit using it's coldest setting). I could generate an EXTREME temperature difference between the milk and the cooling fluid, thus dramatically speeding up the cooling process. The only issue with that, is that without some kind of stirring action in the milk container, I have a feeling the milk along the containers wall would freeze before the milk in the center sufficiently cooled. But I might have to try The second thing was this thermal conductivity.
<Wrap up of backstory>
So if you're still with me, kudos. We're about to bring this cow back to the barn. So most of us home milkers use glass containers to cool and store our milk. The problem is, based on thermal conductivity data tables (and feel free to look this up yourself), the thermal conductivity for glass is somewhere around 1.5 watts per meter Kelvin. Whereas for stainless steel, it's around 17! Now none of this is real news for most of us, right? We all know metal conducts heat better than many other materials. So the quandary then became, how can I cool my milk into stainless steel containers, without having to put it into a 5 or 10 gallon "dairy can"? What are my options?
So again I looked to the beer boys...and voila! Growlers! The beer guys use "growlers" to transport more than a bottles worth of craft beer. Now many of them are glass, but many are stainless steel. The other issue is that many of them are insulated stainless steel. Perfect for keeping that already cold beverage cold, but terrible if you're us and are actually looking to lose heat as fast as possible. So I had to find something that was single walled...and I did!
Without further adue, let me show you the "Grizzly Growler" from Truefabrications:
It's a half gallon container. I think it even has a shape reminiscent of the old milk jugs. Got a plastic cap with a silicone gasket on it. Now it does have internal neck threads, since that's what the beer guys use, but I don't think that'll be much of a problem. Here's a shot:
And just for comparison's sake. Here it is next to a normal 1/2 gallon Ball mason Jar:
This is really exciting for me cause I drink about 3/4's of a gallon a day, and I absolutely LOATHE pouring (can I be real with you?...drinking) out of all these wide mouth containers. It spills everywhere, and every time I try to put the dang lid back on milk runs down the side of the container. I wanted something that was easier to use. These should allow that.
So I'll be able to fill these, directly from my milk bucket. Put them into my cooling device (for right now I'm using a cooler filled with ice water) and I hope to significantly improve upon my cooling time/performance. I actually want to try timing this whole thing. I figure I'll get a half gallon in the glass, half gallon in the stainless steel, put them both in the cooler with ice, and record the temperatures every 5-10 minutes for an hour or so. See how much of a difference it makes. I'll post the results of that test back here.
The other neat things, is that the growler is about half the weight. I actually put them on the kitchen scale, and the mason jar weight 26.5 oz, whereas the growler weighs 15.4 oz. And obviously with these, if you drop it, it aint gonna break into a million dangerous pieces either.
I even thought if one was so inclined, they'd be a cool marketing container too. The pictures of these when they're powder coating look really good. I thought powder coat it white or something, slap your farm logo on it. Make them your loaner milk containers. They'd look so chic.
Anyway, lastly, for the longest time these were $24 each. But recently I found them on amazon for $12. So that's partially why I finally decided to grab a handful.
The only issue I can see is that the small neck will make cleaning them a bit more difficult. But I plan to put them in the dishwasher anyway. And if that proves to be ineffective. I'll just make myself some sort of simple bottle washer and do a bunch at one time. No biggie. But I honestly think the'll wash up in the dishwasher just fine. The neck isn't that small. Specially if I rinse them out a bit before putting them in there.
Ok that's about it for now. Just wanted to share.
I just picked up some cool jugs that I wanted to share with everyone, as they're a bit outside the norm. Now if you'll indulge me, there's a bit of a back story. Should you like to skip ahead, feel free, I'll mark it accordingly.
Backstory and Discussion:
So for the past year or more I've been thinking about this milk cooling dilemma. There's ready made options like the Milkplan bulktanks sold by Hamby, Partsdept, and Bobwhite. But those are a decent amount of cash, and further, it just bugs me that they're so expensive for what they are. Most of us don't need to meet 3A standards (although it's a nice goal standard). Additionally I've loved the idea of using a chest freezer, but it comes with it's own challenges.
So I've been pretty set/obsessed with the idea of using a chest freezer full of liquid, as a cooling medium for a long time. Originally, I was going to try to "build" my own budget bulk tank out of a chest freezer. I found a site called "usedstainlesssteelbarrrels.com" that sells all manner of interesting SS containers. I thought I'd drop a 15, 20, 30 gallon SS drum into a chest freezer, maybe right up my own mixing motor and paddle and voila. But for all my efforts, I had a hard time solving a couple problems:
Problem 1: How to remove the milk from large storage container. In a bulk tank, it has a conveniently located valve on the bottom for dispensing. In a chest freezer, you cant drill through the side (in order to connect to an outlet on the bottom of your SS container) because you risk hitting a coolant line and instantly turning your chest freezer into a big paperweight...or cooler. Now I've drawn a lot of inspiration from the DIY beer brewers. That community is very large (much bigger than the home milkers) and yet they have many of the same needs we do, like keeping everything sanitary, excessive cleaning, cooling/heating, etc. So what those guys do is add "collars" to their chest freezers so that they can pass plumbing/electrical lines through. I wont get into it much but if you search it you'll find what I'm talking about.
Problem 2: Problem 2 ties a bit into Problem 1. But Problem 2 is how to keep the milk stirred in a bulk container. Traditionally they use paddles. Now I can go over to any supplier, grab myself a gear motor (something that turns at 35rpm-ish) and mount it to the top of the chest freezer. But then I have to find/make a stainless steel paddle and shaft. The shaft is relatively easy, but the paddle proved hard to find, so I'd be looking at making one. Then you'd still have the dilemma of how to properly seal the shaft hole in the chest freezer. I looked at doing this a few different ways but ultimately lost interest as this became one problem of many.
So for a while I thought, why don't I get a small circulation pump, and put it inside the freezer, and run the supply tube from the milk container in the freezer, back into itself? That would allow me to keep the milk contantly stirred, but also have a pump available for dispensing the milk out of the large container into bottles for consumption. The pump would mount above the freezers liquid level on one of the DIY collars I talked about earlier. And since the whole assembly would be inside the chest freezer, the milk that was coming out of the milk container and getting pumped, would still be kept cold. THE ONLY issue with this is that circulation pumps that are sanitary stainless steel are not designed to pull suction. They are a centrifugal style pump. Which means that since the pump would have to sit above the milk, I'd have to prime it every single time I wanted to use it, or more so, everytime I totally emptied the milk container. So I decided against it. Although, there's still real merit in the idea IMO.
Additionally, I eventually want my whole cleaning process to be completely automatic (something for which I have a SUPER COOL idea I'm gonna start working on this winter, that is going to...blow...your...minds...but I digress). And the idea of manually having to clean a bulk tank is just not working for me.
Ok so that's about where the idea of replicating a bulk tank with a chest freezer ended. So I went back to the idea of using the chest freezer as a "new age" spring box. Since that's exactly what it is, right. In the old days, they'd take the 10 gallon cans of milk, put them in a "box" of some kind with cold spring water that flooded the box and cooled the milk containers. The chest freezer is doing exactly that, only it uses a compressor to keep the liquid cool, instead of bringing in fresh spring water. So after much lamenting I figured, if I'm a small producer, why not just embrace being small and do what they did. So that's where I'm at right now.
So, in a previous thread last year I showed how to calculate the BTU's of heat that your milk contains, and how to calculate the BTU's of cooling fluid the chest freezer needs to contain to effectively cool your milk down to sub 40F in the required time frame. So I know how much cooling fluid I'll need (meaning, I know how big of a chest freezer I'll need). Now a little while back I decided to try to calculate how FAST that process was going to happen. This was an interesting journey because it took me into thermodynamic physics and all that. After a few days, a few spreadsheets, I discovered that if I used Fourier's Law (which is the Thermal Conduction equation) I can calculate how fast those BTU's of heat energy will transfer, from my milk, through my stainless steel vessel, and into my freezers cooling liquid. The problem I discovered, is that like much of physics, the equation shows you how fast heat transfers, given all the variables remain the same. It does not tell you how fast the TEMPERATURE changes. But again, we can easily related BTU's to Temperature so that became inconsequential. HOWEVER...what did become evident (and this was after consulting with my father who is an engineer who told me "god that's all thermodynamics, and I barely passed that class 30 years ago" (soooo way to go dad, big help). Anyhow, what became evident is that apparently, when trying to calculate stuff like I am in the real world, accurate models have to be computer generated because you have to take into account fluid densities, the shape of the container, etc etc etc. And apparently when industry has to figure it out, you literally can not calculate it. So I decided that was all there was gonna be on that.
BUTTT, what I did learn from Fourier's Law is that the SPEED of heat transfer is basically ONLY due to 3 things: The temperature difference between the two fluids, the thickness of the container, and the thermal conductivity of the containers material. Which is super exciting right!?
So this led to 2 new thoughts: 1) If I could generate super cooling fluid in the freezer (by mixing it with food grade glycol) and lower the freezing point of the fluid down to say, -20F (Which a chest freezer will hit using it's coldest setting). I could generate an EXTREME temperature difference between the milk and the cooling fluid, thus dramatically speeding up the cooling process. The only issue with that, is that without some kind of stirring action in the milk container, I have a feeling the milk along the containers wall would freeze before the milk in the center sufficiently cooled. But I might have to try The second thing was this thermal conductivity.
<Wrap up of backstory>
So if you're still with me, kudos. We're about to bring this cow back to the barn. So most of us home milkers use glass containers to cool and store our milk. The problem is, based on thermal conductivity data tables (and feel free to look this up yourself), the thermal conductivity for glass is somewhere around 1.5 watts per meter Kelvin. Whereas for stainless steel, it's around 17! Now none of this is real news for most of us, right? We all know metal conducts heat better than many other materials. So the quandary then became, how can I cool my milk into stainless steel containers, without having to put it into a 5 or 10 gallon "dairy can"? What are my options?
So again I looked to the beer boys...and voila! Growlers! The beer guys use "growlers" to transport more than a bottles worth of craft beer. Now many of them are glass, but many are stainless steel. The other issue is that many of them are insulated stainless steel. Perfect for keeping that already cold beverage cold, but terrible if you're us and are actually looking to lose heat as fast as possible. So I had to find something that was single walled...and I did!
Without further adue, let me show you the "Grizzly Growler" from Truefabrications:
It's a half gallon container. I think it even has a shape reminiscent of the old milk jugs. Got a plastic cap with a silicone gasket on it. Now it does have internal neck threads, since that's what the beer guys use, but I don't think that'll be much of a problem. Here's a shot:
And just for comparison's sake. Here it is next to a normal 1/2 gallon Ball mason Jar:
This is really exciting for me cause I drink about 3/4's of a gallon a day, and I absolutely LOATHE pouring (can I be real with you?...drinking) out of all these wide mouth containers. It spills everywhere, and every time I try to put the dang lid back on milk runs down the side of the container. I wanted something that was easier to use. These should allow that.
So I'll be able to fill these, directly from my milk bucket. Put them into my cooling device (for right now I'm using a cooler filled with ice water) and I hope to significantly improve upon my cooling time/performance. I actually want to try timing this whole thing. I figure I'll get a half gallon in the glass, half gallon in the stainless steel, put them both in the cooler with ice, and record the temperatures every 5-10 minutes for an hour or so. See how much of a difference it makes. I'll post the results of that test back here.
The other neat things, is that the growler is about half the weight. I actually put them on the kitchen scale, and the mason jar weight 26.5 oz, whereas the growler weighs 15.4 oz. And obviously with these, if you drop it, it aint gonna break into a million dangerous pieces either.
I even thought if one was so inclined, they'd be a cool marketing container too. The pictures of these when they're powder coating look really good. I thought powder coat it white or something, slap your farm logo on it. Make them your loaner milk containers. They'd look so chic.
Anyway, lastly, for the longest time these were $24 each. But recently I found them on amazon for $12. So that's partially why I finally decided to grab a handful.
The only issue I can see is that the small neck will make cleaning them a bit more difficult. But I plan to put them in the dishwasher anyway. And if that proves to be ineffective. I'll just make myself some sort of simple bottle washer and do a bunch at one time. No biggie. But I honestly think the'll wash up in the dishwasher just fine. The neck isn't that small. Specially if I rinse them out a bit before putting them in there.
Ok that's about it for now. Just wanted to share.