carboy size madness continues

The last I heard there was no such thing as a weights & measures _milk_ standard.

Surely someone in the Penn State chemistry or physics lab could help you with this problem. You could either use a large graduated cylinder to fill to 5 or 6 gallons and mark the outside of the carboy(s), or simply weigh the carboy, both empty and full, and calculate the volume from the difference.

Tom S

Reasonable, cheap? Use water!. Weigh empty carboy; fill with water and weigh again. Difference divided by liters = ? Right on! Ed Holland

"Dr. Richard E. Hawkins" schreef in bericht news:cb1kjt$ltm$ snipped-for-privacy@f04n12.cac.psu.edu...

4 cups in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon. 16x5 = 80 cups...

16x6 = 96 cups.

It could be tedious....but, if I understand your dilemma right, you need to just pour in all these cups of water... take an empty milk jug, see if 16 cups fits in it, and where it fits, mark the line.. Then take the milk jug, pour 5 or 6 of them into your carboys, mark it with duct tape. Then you'll know.

Rick

help you

ask a janitor, they're usually adept at real life problems.

I just had to calibrate some water flow meters at work and found this useful when I did so.

One US gallon of water weighs 8.33 lbs. I wanted to calibrate the scale, so I ran in 20 gallons of water into a container and expected to see 166.6 lbs of water. The difference between what I measured and what I expected was the accuracy of the scale.

If you have a resonably good bathroom scale, then put your carboy on it, record the measure (or zero the scale...) and start filling with water.

When the scale hits (weight of carboy) + 50 lbs, you have 6 US gallons of water.

If you want imperial gallons, one imperial gallon of water weighs in at 10.0 lbs.

This will all be within certain limits, of course. If your scale is

+- .01 lbs, then that translates to +- 1.28 oz (not very much).

Some will say that one gallon of water will change volume based on tempertature (because both the liquid and glass expand and contract based on temperature.) Personally, I have never seen much variance in my carboys, so for this it would be best for you to measure both at a "standard" temperature. That is, what is the temperature that you will measure it at later? When you fill your carboy with water to measure it, stick a thermometer in it and make sure it is close to what you will see later before you mark your line or whatever at the 6 gallon mark. Just for grins, do this with hot water, measure, then measure again when the water is at room temperature. Is there much of a difference? I would be interested in doing that experiment.

I found a calculator on the internet that gives density of water at a certain temperature. The density at 70 deg. f (21.2 C) is .998000, the density at 50 deg F (10 C) is .999728, a difference of approximately .002%. This temperature range will throw off your calculation another .2 oz. Just reading the volume off of the side of your carboy is going to be more imprecise than the variance of figuring out what is in there based on weight and temperature.

In the end, what difference does it really make whether you have 4 or

3 bottles extra when you rack? Use it later, or just dump any extra you have into your next batch. Mine just gets consumed or stuck on a shelf and turned into an experiment of some kind. If you make country wines, mix all your extras together and make tooty-fruity!

In the few batches I have made (probably 10 by now), I have noticed a large variance in the amount of lees after primary and secondary. Maybe this is what is throwing you off?

Having said all this, I do find it useful to have simple marks on the sides of my buckets used for botteling and primaries to get me close. If you have that big of a problem telling how much is in a carboy, it will likely help but not for anything other than knowing that you can fit this much "stuff" into this container but that same amount would overflow this other container.

Good luck!

Alex.

Not so: the difference measures the combined INaccuracies of the scale, the marked capacity of the container, the precision with which you filled it to its marked capacity, and the repeatability of said filling (if you used a container smaller than 20 gallons and filled it several times).

You have *approximately* 6 US gallons. :-)

Oh so true. When I was working on my Ph.D in Biophysics at U of H, I had an aluminum coffee pot in my office. It had got to where it was percolating but shutting itself off without really heating the water. A fellow student and I were discussing all sorts of wild theories of why this might happen. A maintenance man was in the office doing something at the time and he commented without even looking at the pot "The lid is in too far so the hot water falls back down the tube and the thermostat is shutting off too soon." I looked at the pot and sure enough the lid was pushed in. I popped it back up and it worked perfectly. I felt like a Ph.D Idiot. I guess I was a Ph.D Idiot. It was humbling.

Sorry guys but nothing to do with winemaking.

Ray

Someone at your school has a calibrated measure.... Find it and use it to mark your vessels.

what about a shrubbery. bring me a shrubbery.

Ha, just a flesh wound!!!!

The question is how exact "1 gallon" has to be for milk sales.

:)

hawk

That was my first attempt. I used a two-quart measuring cup. But that gave me the line that produced a couple bottles less than came from the

6 gallon juice batch . . . The variability would be even worse with a larger number of smaller cups . . .

hawk

This seems to be the way to go. I don't need *exact*< but it would be nice to be within a quart, or much less than a quart . . .

hawk

I'll check with our chemistry professor. Yep, we're so small that there's only one . . .

hawk

Very exact. But the container does not have to be exact. It just has to be a little bigger than 1 gal. The pump that pumps the milk into the container meters the milk and it has to be exact.

Ray

Ahh, but you see, I don't need the cartons. I bring home 6 gallons of milk every weekend . . . I was going to pour it into the carboy and back.

hawk

The easiest thing I can think of would be for you to buy a gallon of distilled water, mark the fill level. Dump it into the carboy in question. Fill the water jug up to there again and repeat, marking each time on the carboy. You will be pretty close doing it this way. If it does not fill it up, use something else to figure out the difference, you have the bulk of the measurement already.

Could you use the milk jug idea? Sure, but all of this assumes that the injection mold that made it was perfect (and it probably was not) and the jug does not change with temperature. None of that is correct; of course it changes, everything does. The water jug was made in the same machine, but if you are looking for e precision of a few ounces, you should be OK.

Now the right way to do this is:

If you have precise scale or load cell that can measure 50 to 60 pounds with a few hundredths of precision:

A gallon of water= 3785.5 ml

(5) 750 ml bottles of wine = 3750 ml, it's within 1%.

Pure water (free from air) weighs:

999.13 gm/L @ 15C or 8.337 lbs/gal (US) 998.23 gm/L @ 20C or 8.330 lbs/gAL (US) 997.07 gm/L @ 25C OR 8.320 lbs/gal (US)

If you want to get really precise, use distilled water for all of this and measure the temperature of the water and carboys, or leave them in the same place for a day to stabilize.

Class A graduated cylinders are made of borosilicate glass and have a known predictatble coefficient of thermal expansion. They can be used as primary standards for volume. That is actually the correct way to do this. It may be equvalent to killing a fly with a nuclear weapon though... :o) Regards, Joe

Out of curiosity, why aren't you filling the carboys to the top? My carboys all have their volume marked on the bottom & if you fill them up you always get the same amount of wine (30 bottles from a 23 litre carboy)