HERMS Coil Question - More coils submerged or space between coils?

[Setesh]

My HERMS coil just arrived from stainlessbrewing and it looks great. It is 50ft of 1/2" stainless. When I went to fit it in my keggle I realized I have a choice to make between two options:

1. I can have all of the coil under water with about 11 gallons of water but there will be no space in between the coils.
2. I could space the coils and need almost 14 gallons of water to completely cover the coil.

I know the more coils that are submerged the better, but with a 50ft coil does it matter more than having space between the coils? Can anyone advise me?

BTW, the coil arrived in great shape and is perfectly done. I'm very impressed!

 

[MadGus]

My $0.02 is that spacing the coils even slightly will increase the surface area and improve your temp ramp times. Having said that, think about the batch sizes you will likely brew , and whether you will need to "top off" your HLT after you start sparging, in order to keep the coil fully submerged.

I chose to space coils, and as a result, I top off the HLT and allow the water in mash tun/herms to equalize temps with HLT before I mash in my grain.

 

[Setesh]

My $0.02 is that spacing the coils even slightly will increase the surface area and improve your temp ramp times. Having said that, think about the batch sizes you will likely brew , and whether you will need to "top off" your HLT after you start sparging, in order to keep the coil fully submerged.

I chose to space coils, and as a result, I top off the HLT and allow the water in mash tun/herms to equalize temps with HLT before I mash in my grain.

That brings up a question I hadn't thought of. If you top off then do you re adjust your salts or do you just brew strait filtered water so you don't need to worry about salt additions? I guess it wouldn't be a big deal to just calculate out what the extra salt addition would be for the extra water, but it still seems like a pain. How do you handle that?

 

[MadGus]

I am just getting into water chemistry now. Bought a pH meter and sent a sample of my tap off to Ward's for analysis... so I hope to have a better answer starting with my next brew session.

Usually, I brew dark beers, and have been happy with the flavors by simply filtering and using campden tab for chloramine. However, I would like to improve my IPAs... so I suspect that I will end up calculating out the extra salt addition.

Oh, and my setup has the same coil as yours... it rocks.

 

[Setesh]

Well I just learned something.....stretching the coils apart rapidly changes the orientation of the bent ends. In other words the ends were withing 10 degrees of parallel to each other when the coil arrived. I bent the coils apart enough to have about 1/8" of air space between each coil with the coil free standing. By the time I finished the ends were 35 degrees apart and very unhappy about going back to parallel. I think I took out some of the stress on the coil by bending it in another direction, and now it is much more springy. After applying Bobby's bulkhead/compression fittings I was able to force the ends into place through the keg wall but it is putting a lot of side load on the fittings. I'm scared to try to twist the coil tighter to alleviate the problem, but I don't see any other solution. Hind sight, in this case, is 20/20. What do you think? Anyone had success tightening a thin walled coil up a bit? I need about 35 degrees to get them parallel.