Beer Forum

Hey all. I am welding up the sculpture. Made provisions for mouting the bruners in their factory shells on a simple shelf. Any thoughts on why people remove them from the facotry mounts and mount them free air like I have seen in other postings?

I am concerned that the manufactures of these burners have designed them to work most effectively in the enclosures they came in. Flame controls, heat transfer, flame/air stoicheometry, etc.

Thanks all!

What enclosures? I'm guessing most people are buying the burners bare, from places like
http://www.tejassmokers.com/castironburners.htm
http://thegrillstoreandmore.com/departm ... _7133.html
http://www.cpapc.com/store/CHINESE-WOK-RANGES-C244.aspx

Oh, and they show up on Amazon too.

Bayou Classis. They provide the stand and shroud. I got a great deal on it, did not shop around for bare units, nor do I want to invest more in Stainless tubing to build the shroud. My question, and I did not do a good job at posing it, more so deals with the science behind developing the flame in its most efficient form. Does flame propagation benefit from having said shrouds? how close to the pot surface (bottom) should the flame be? How much of a gap around the sides of the pot? Etc.

Just hate to drop so much time, blood, sweat and money into this to find out I did not engineer the boil stand very well. $500 in SS fittings to date, and $400 in SS tubing and angle.

Thanks for your help thus far!

The shroud sure helps if there is any wind. I would say that you want to put the burners far enough away from the kettle so that it spreads out the flame as much as possible. Not to much, of course. Any flame that trickles around the side is not doing anything for your fuel efficiency. Too close and you are going to concentrate your flame to the point that you might get unnecessary carmelization of the wort. On a side note - those kettles from B3 are badass. The aluminum plate helps spread out the heat to avoid the hotspots - so you could probably place the burners closer than you would normally.

You can probably just mount them as they are. Those burners with their shrounds and their fixed height are probably designed for a big turkey fryin' pot - maybe a little smaller than a keggle.


Mylo

I did this on my second burner install. I work for a fire sprinkler company, this is standard equipment. Also Like how it looks. This was for the new HLT, I need some wind screens in a bad way. More for blocking heat than wind.

Buying bare burners saves you a few bucks and many of the shrouds/windscreens have to heavily modified to fit the burner frame. If you don't have a wind issue; no need for a wind screen. If you do, old corny kegs make great screens; at lest for the smaller, 55K btu burners most commonly found with Cajun/Turkey-cooker style burner. I keep the top of the blue flame 4" inches below the bottom of the kettle. The screen top should be just below the bottom surface of the kettle.This setup prevents flames leaking out around the kettle sides. The burner shrouds really don't have anything to do with flame combustion or efficiency. That comes from the air/fuel ration entering the venture of the burner. Adjusting the air plate should allow you to adjust the flame so it burns blue without the flames lifting off the burner jets. Too much air and the whole flame will blow out easily and make more noise than otherwise. Too little air and the flame will burn yellow at the top of the flame and produce CO ... not a good thing. good luck