Digital flow meter for transferring beer for bottling.

[matridium]

The Problem:
Knowing how much beer is really in the fermenter before bottling. Issue: how much priming sugar to add because you don't know really how much beer is really in the fermenter.
Possible solution? A digital flow meter that can go inline from fermenter to bottling vessel that can give you a very close approximation to how much beer you transferred.

There are commercial solutions out there, such flow meters can be expensive, and I think the pressure needs to be high to activate the meter. There are smaller garden hose meters but again I think PSI needs to be high for them to work. I know the SF800 meter is a low flow meter maybe it can be used?
IS This something that can be done affordable, Arduino? RPi? is it even a good idea? would others actually use this kind of device?
And yes I know you can put marks on the outside or inside or whatever and get a really good idea, but sometimes people need to tinker and make things way more complicated and I'm one of those people.
Just an idea...

 

[day_trippr]

As a user of SF800 meters doing duty in my keezer and with my RO water system I can say they are accurate down to ~1/3 LPM - that is the product flow rate out of my RO system. Cumulative error at that flow rate for 20 gallons is roughly a quart - so around 1.25%, while the advertised +/-1% performance specs have a .5 LPM floor.

While I am a big fan of digitizing stuff (like said RO system and my six tap keezer ) in this case a much simpler way to deal with this fairly well bounded issue is to invest a modest amount of time to measure and mark a bottling vessel with graduated volume marks...

Cheers!