Why do I keep ending up with not nearly enough beer?

[linusstick]

In using Beersmith I keep running into not having enough beer at bottling. I BIAB and I just realized part of my problem today that I had my loss to trub set at 0 and after I racked to my bottling bucket I have .25 gallons of trub (I only do what's supposed to be 1.5 gallon batches although I've never ended up with even a gallon yet after 8 beers). What else could be a culprit? I use an online strike water calculator (BIABcalculator.com) and don't use Beersmith for that although the water volume Is usually really close). I set the trub to 0 going into the feemwnter because usually dump the whole thin in. I could see if I was off a little bit but this last batch I had about .75 gallons instead of 1.5. I looked at my notes and my volume was only 1 gallon and my gravity was way too high. I added .25 gallons of spring water to compensate but even 1.25 gallons going into the fermenter yielded .75 gallons coming out with only .25 trub. Where is the rest of this loss coming from?

 

[linusstick]

Follow up question is should I just follow Beersmith with my water calculations instead of using different calculators for different things? I don't use it for strike water because the only time I did it calculated the temperature way too high and I had to drop a lot of ice cubes into the mash to cool it down. The other calculators I use hit me right on with temperature

 

[doug293cz]

I like this calculator for water volumes and strike temp. It's very accurate if you give it good inputs.

Brew on