Tilt Hydrometer

[Kealia]

Wow, that's unfortunate. Not working on OG seems like a huge miss. And how can it not work during heavy active fermentation? That's when I would want to know how fast it's changing.

[Beer-lord]

Maybe I got a lemon tilt! So far it's been accurate for the final gravity so I'll give it 1.26398574 stars.

[mashani]

It would seem to me that accuracy should be step 1 for such a device?

All the other bells and whistles and such are great, but without step 1, it's just bells and whistles.

[Beer-lord]

I'm back!!!!!
New brew and trying again. This time the Tilt, Refractometer and Hydrometer were all reporting the same thing (matched the recipe too!).
Not sure if I did anything different but I did calibrate in water 3 seconds before I added it to the fermenter. Last time is was about 30 minutes later. Does that make a difference.
Also, I measured before adding any of the liquid yeast. Normally I cold crash the yeast and the amount added is not much at all and should make no difference in the reading. But, since I had 1.75 liters of yeast to go in, that would most likely reduce the reading of the OG so I measured everything before the yeast. Not sure if any of this made a difference but I'll see how the rest of the ferment goes because I have the fermenter so full, I'm afraid when it goes active (Kveik Hornindal), the Tilt will be touching the top and I'm not sure what that will do so skew the readings.

[mashani]

I'm back!!!!!
Not sure if I did anything different but I did calibrate in water 3 seconds before I added it to the fermenter. Last time is was about 30 minutes later. Does that make a difference.

If it actually does, then the thing doesn't stay calibrated very well. The only other thing I could think of would be if the water calibrated in was a much different temperature then the wort you dropped it into the first time around.

[berryman]

Well, your reviews have up and down. I see on another forum I go to have had some problems with tilt also. I have mixed ideas on it, it would be great if worked as should, but I don't want to spend money on something that might work good or not that great. Do you recommend it at this time?

[Beer-lord]

No I can't recommend it, mostly for the cost. It's simple enough and I think it can be useful to some but it's not going to make your beer taste any better.

[berryman]

No I can't recommend it

I have been following this thread, and go by what you think,

[Beer-lord]

It's fun but I'm sure it'll improve over time. Stay tuned for a better version.

[Beer-lord]

My latest batch showed the Tilt to be much more accurate. It was off with the Hydrometer at OG by .02 but hit the FG dead on. The only oddity I noticed this time was when I cold crashed, there was a short period where it read .997 which must have been related to the fast crashing temps?????
And, I did nothing different this time.

[Kealia]

That's the worst kind of change, IMO. If you did nothing different but got different results, then it's a consistency issue with the Tilt which would drive me nutty.

[mashani]

The fast crashing temp issue is odd, because (as a coder) I would have thought it would just be looking up table #'s to use for calculations based on current temperature sensor reading - unless it is only polling that sensor every few hours or something, and your temperature was dropping tremendously faster then it was polling so it was using the wrong lookup?

If it only checks various sensors with a very slow polling rate, I guess that could explain many of the inconstancies though? It might even be using the wrong temperature for your OG calculation if it didn't poll the wort temperature right away. It could be using the ambient temperature of the air or water it was calibrated in instead in that scenario...

[Beer-lord]

I guess I'm just a beta tester!