I’ve been trying for two weeks to hook up the new cheese vat/pasteurizer. I hadn’t realized that the pump wouldn’t pull water from the tank to the vat, it would only push. So I had to re-plumb and re-wire the pump in the other room. Then it didn’t pump, and when I disassembled it, found that a piece of insulation had lodged in the impeller. Then I discovered that I had hooked up the vat backwards (there are no labels telling which is the inlet and outlet).
Finally, it’s hooked up. Water comes in from the solar hot water tank, runs through a tankless heater to boost the temp, and into the vat. An atmospheric-pressure tank (i.e. unpressurized) encloses the bottom of the insulated vat. When water reaches a specified level, it begins to run out of the vat. I installed a second pump to return the expended water to the solar tank.
Tomorrow, we’ll fill the tank with a hundred gallons of water and see if it heats! (No sense wasting milk on an experiment.) If it works, we’ll have the dairy inspector out to license our “new” pasteurizer.
