Advice needed: Wine storage and floating lids

I have experience in a commercial winery with floating lids up to 15000 litre tanks. These things are very heavy and a real bother to set up. You need a whinch to raise and lower the lids and either an arch over the tank or a bolt in the ceiling to hold the weight of the lid ( the membrane on the lid cannot support the lid weight alone). The lids are usually sealed to the sides of the tanks using a rubber membrane that looks like bike tube and inflates in much the same manner. They work well when being installed clean and fresh on a newly filled tanks but on active tanks with sticky sides or dirty membranes the tube sticks to the tank walls and never pulls cleanly up or down. While in theory it sounds nice it's a lot easier effort wise just to use N2/CO2 gas to purge the head space of O2 and refresh it every so often.

I never found that floating is the correct term as the lid works best if suspended just above the liquid by a 1/4 inch or so. It's very hard to get inflate the membrane and not ooze juice on top of the lid if you have contact.

For these large tanks thinkof the fiasco of having some tank gas pressure causing the membrane to ooze wine on top of the lid where fruit flies are gathering and mold is starting to grow and it's 6 feet down the side of the tank! You have to clean the mess off before it breaches the membrane and you can't raise the lid to do it.

All I have is a 200 liter tank, but I will echo all your complaints (well, OK I don't need a ceiling mounted winch for mine).

Nice idea in theory, but this fall when it came time to protecting my must as fermentation was dying down, I just resorted to some heavy plastic sheeting. I doubt if I'll ever use the lid again.

Brian

Did I mention you should check the membrane air prerssure frequenlty to make sure the seal still exists? Thay have habit of slowly leaking even if the membrane is not ruptured.

Thanks for the opinions. I was looking for something in the 10-20 gallon range. An alternative to having "break down" the wine into smaller containers once the original container is opened.

The "floating lids" sound like more trouble than they are worth. I think I might investigate kegging with Nitrogen a little more closely.

JF,

I'll weigh in on this. I think your getting extremely misleading advise. I have VC tanks also and they're "a dream" to use. DON'T rely on gas to keep the oxygen off the wine if you can physically reduce it. VC tanks if used right do the job as good if not better than any container I've used. You do have to watch the air at the beginning just to make sure it's set up correctly BUT once you connect all the fittings snuggly you shouldn't have a problem. As far as the cover being too heavy, it's not the cover, there should be multiple "hooks on the lid and ALL the hooks should be supported by ropes. If there is

1 rope for a big lid then either the lid was manufactured wrong or someone forgot to attach a rope to all the hooks. It doesn't take long to take all the ropes and make them into a same length basket with 1 rope coming up from there to attach to the ceiling if that needs to be done.

Bob

Experience is not getting advice. Did you mean giving advice?

My experience isn't with small home versions it's full sized industrial tanks 22 feet high and upto 10 feet in diameter. The prefered method was always a solid tank filled to capacity; the floating lids tanks were more show items for the tour groups than primary use tanks. Where I worked the tank lids are steel, bolt clamped to the steel tank with an inch thick rubber gasket. The head space-if existing- was always purged with N2/CO2 through a gas fitting and bleeder valve.

A 10 foot diameter lid made of stainless steel quite massive and the four point attachment system used close to 200 linear feet of rope to suport one lid. You could have used a few less ropes but the redunancy is to prevent having to lift several hundred pounds of steel lid off the bottom of a full tank. Come to think of one of the smaller 7000 litre tanks did suffer this fate during the first year of setting up the tanks. Moral of the storey: unless the ropes are tied off securley don't answer your cell phone. To raise of lower a lid you still needed several people or a winch. Not once did a tank lid pull cleanly after it had been sitting on a tank. The rubber sticks to the steel surface too well.