upgrade

You are currently browsing articles tagged upgrade.

In a fortunate sighting on Craigslist, and a very understanding wife, I was able to get some “new to me” equipment for very very cheap to allow me to do all grain brewing for up to 10G batches.  The stuff could use some cleaning, but I got:

  • 24G stainless steel kettle with thermometer, sight tube, valve, and bazooka screen.
  • 16G stainless steel kettle with thermometer and valve.
  • 2 propane burners.
  • 6.5G glass carboy with top, thermometer tube, and 3 piece airlock.
  • 2000mL Erlenmeyer flask with stopper
  • homemade stir plate (no stir bar)

 

I had this great plan on how to do incremental upgrades from 5G extract brewing to 5G all grain brewing then to 10G all grain brewing, but this purchase basically jumps me right up to being able to do all grain brewing now!  I’m still going to do a couple of 5G batches to start so that I can figure out how to all grain brew and to understand my equipment a bit more, but stepping up to 10G batches will mean that I have/need/get to brew less and will have to do more fun things with Lisa and Chase.

Tags: , , , , ,

I’m getting ready to make the leap into all grain brewing and am pretty excited, but I want to do it right.  I don’t want to buy things to turn around a few batches down the road and wish I had bought something else.  So I want to either make sure the things I buy now will work for future upgrades.  A couple of key things to keep in mind is that I am doing 5 gallon batches now, but might want to do 10 gallon batches in the future.  Also, I like high gravity brews which requires more grain to get the more sugars, so again I need to think about the volume capability of the upgrades.

Key Items for all grain brewing

  • Hot Liquid Tank – HLT
  • Propane or Electric Burner
  • Mash/Lauder Tun – MLT
  • Mash Paddle
  • Kettle / brew pot

To get into all grain brewing from what I have now (see my tools here) I will need to get a mash/lauder tun (MLT), a mash paddle, and a large kettle.  I’ll explain my logic as I go through each one.

Hot Liquid Tank – HLT

A HLT is a fancy brewers way of saying a pot or kettle for heating water.  The hot water here will go into the MLT.  I have an existing 5G stainless steel pot which will be sufficient for 5G batches.  For 10G batches I’ll need a large pot, but my plan will be to buy a larger pot when time comes for this.  At the very least I’m not buying something now that won’t be used later.

Propane or Electric Burner

I have an existing 38,000 BTU burner from the turkey fryer kit I bought to get into home brewing.  From my calculations my burner should be good for batches up to ….TBD

To eventually do a 10G batch I have calculated that I’ll need about a TBD burner.

Mash/Luader Tun

Since a MLT isn’t needed for extract brewing I don’t have any existing equipment and will have to buy something new.  Seems like when someone gets into a really fancy brewing setup the MLT is a stainless steel pot, but many successful and far cheaper options use a converted cooled as they can easily be converted into an MLT and are fairly inexpensive.  Additionally, MLTs can be made for fly sparging or batch sparging.  I’m going to plan to do batch sparging as it seems this is relatively foolproof and the advantages for fly sparging aren’t too great.   I want to be sure that the MLT that I end up with will be good for 5G batches now and 10G batches in the future.

A high gravity (barleywine) 10G batch will have 45lbs amount of grain and at most 27.25  gal of water in the MLT at one time.   Remember the space in lid usually counts as part of the volume for a cooler so plan for a slightly larger cooler.  From this I get a cooler size with at least 94qt of internal space.   Well a 100qt coleman extreme cooler is going to only have about 80.25qt of internal space, but I figure I won’t be making any 10G batches of barelywine and will call it good.  Also, many poeple have recommended that a 70 qt (17.5G) is good for up to 10G batches.  The coleman extreme cooler comes highly recommended since it has a drain groove through the bottom.  With this cooler in mind a 5G batch will have a volume of 18 qt.    So with that in mind a 70-100qt cooler should be good into the future.

So I received a 100qt coleman extereme cooler for my birthday, but I have some questions about it as it isn’t as I thought it would be.  Read more on the Home Brew Talk Forums.

Mash Paddle

I’ll need a mash paddle.  I’ve read to use a hardwoord such as maple makes a good paddle.  Also, when making the paddle drill/cut good size holes in it to break up the dough balls well.

Kettle Upgrade

As I mentioned below I’m planning to use my existing kettle 7.5G kettle to become my HLT and then will purchase a new kettle.  Since I want to to small brewing upgrades without having to discard things in the future I’m planning to buy a kettle that will work for 5G and 10G batches, but to save money now I’m going to pass on any of the extra gizmos (thermometers, valves, sight tubes) for now.

Other posts suggest that a 80 qt (20G) stainless steel pot/kettle can do 10G batches.

In my quest to selecting a kettle I asked for some help with the selection criteria on homebrewtalk.com forums (here).

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Well it turns out Jeep has done a pretty bad job of maintaining the navigation unit software which has been buggy at best.  In our case it is the 730N RHR unit on the Jeep Grand Cherokee  After a lot of searching, mostly in the Jeep Garage website,  I was able to find a person, *sox*,  that hosts the files to upgrade the unit as described in this forum post.

Download the Files

Below is the link, username, and password to get the files.

www.mydrive.ch
username: mygig@soxag
password: gasolio

You will be downloading two files.  The software and the gracenotes ISOs.

As many posts point out version 2.169 is really buggy, was never released, and should not be used.  When I wrote this post 2.136 was the latest version to download.  Though I wonder if a new version is on the way since I saw a person post that they have 2.137.  Below is the path to the ISO file

 Home  MyGIG Software Update  Software – Gracenotes update  RHR-RHW-RHP 2011+ 

Next is the gracenotes.  At the time of this post 4118 was the latest version.  Below is the gracenotes file

 Home  MyGIG Software Update  Software – Gracenotes update  Gracenotes update  Gracenotes RHR-RHW-RHP 2011+ 

Once you have the files you can go about installing the files either of two ways: CD or USB

CD Method

If using the CD method many people, including myself, have had success using the free ImgBurn program.  Simply select the ISO file to burn to the CD and done.  Note: only one ISO per CD.

  1. Turn Car On to at least Accy mode. No need to start the ignition.
  2. Press power on 730n
  3. Load CD into CD Drive
  4. Close Door
  5. It can take a minute for the cd to be recognized.  If it isn’t eject the cd and start over on step 3.
  6. See the installation below

USB Method

I haven’t given this option a try but several posts have reported success. You’ll need a 4GB USB drive to do this.

  1. Turn Car On  to at least Accy mode. No need to start the ignition.
  2. Insert USB drive into USB port on radio.
  3. Press power on radio to turn radio off.
  4. Wait 5 to 10 Seconds and power Radio back on.
  5. It can take a minute for the USB drive to be recognized.  If it isn’t start over.

 Installation

Once it recognized the CD or USB drive you should be prompted to “Proceed with Update”  It will show you the current version and the version it will upgrade to.  Assuming this is what you want press Yes.  The installation took a while, but once it was done you can confirm the upgrade was successful in the System information.

 

 Parting thoughts

Hope this helps someone.  Turns out our hard drive failed in the unit and Jeep had to replace it.  The techs were suprised to see that my unit was upgraded to the latest version which goes to show how poor Jeep is at keeping the customers up to date.  Since the new hard drive was replaced and with the 2.136 version has been installed the nav unit has been much more stable.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Here is a small issue that I ran into.

After upgrading my HTC Evo Shift to Gingerbread I discovered that I could no longer connect my phone to my computer and get to the SD card.  I tried installing the latest HTC Sync software, but that didn’t seem to fix the problem.  I read a few other blogs and then tried getting the latest Android SDK.  After installing that I’m back up and running.  Pretty simple, but pretty annoying.

Tags: , , , , ,