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How do you guys accurately & quickly measure water volume? In & out of the kettle

Cheers, Mat

use a known voulme holder and referance with it

I've got a site-gauge on my urn that I've marked volumes on and I've got a dip-stick with markings on it for my stockpot. Definitely leaves a bit of room for error when trying to use them quickly, but what's a few mL here or there?

Yeah, I use the dipstick method too. Not laboratory accurate, obviously, but good enough for me. Hasn't ruined any beers yet.

Just marked the dipstick (powder-coated Lufkin ruler) as I poured from a measuring jug into the kettle.

I don't bother measuring my liquor from the HLT for mashing in. With my system I know that if I heat it to 8ºC above my desired mash temperature, I know pretty well how much I need to fill the mash tun to get to my desired temperature. Anyway, I fill it to a litre or so short, and slowly add more as I stir and monitor the temperature, until I reach my target. The whole process takes only a few minutes, easy.

My kettle has a marker I made from a copper tube. It hangs on the inside, and I used my Dremel to engrave it with litre markings. Once I finish my first run-off, I look at how much I've collected, deduct that from my target boil volume, and the difference is the amount I need to sparge. Easy enough to measure with a 2 litre container. By the way, I batch sparge. Can't see the point of fly sparging for me, as I don't want any higher efficiency than I can achieve now.

I use two 10 Liter plastic jerry cans which Ivé drawn graduations onto for sparging.
So I use one to measure the water going into my HLT (kettle)
15L for strike & 19L for sparge.

Mick.

I use 99c blue plastic buckets - 9L with 1L markings.

It's not calibrated as such but i use the same buckets all the time.

I get the same volume in the fermenter after every batch.

I sparge into a cube that I've marked out and the 27L mark is pretty much to the top. Then I transfer that into the kettle and boil. I want to mark out my sight guage on my kettle but would think the temp of the wort would alter the markings. Did you guys bring a volume to boil and mark it off? Cooling has a shrinking effect on the final volume but not sure if I should consider that enough of a factor.

Like chadjaja, I sparge into a seperate vessel - in my case a fermenter, which is conveniently already marked in 1 L increments. Since going AG I haven't had 2 beers in primary concurrently (secondary is a cube). Guess I'l cross that bridge when I come to it.

I've marked my sight gauge on my urn (which is my HLT and kettle). I think so long as cooling contraction is taken into account (good ol' Beersmith can do this) then the sight gauge is useful even when boiling.

I am lucky, at work I have a laser machine which can do all sorts of stuff.
We also have software for making dipsticks for fuel tanks of all shapes and sizes, so doing this stuff is easy.

On my urn I made a long sticker with the Litres incremented on it, which is stuck alongside the sight tube.

For my kettle, I made a clear acrylic dipstick, which has the numbers (Litres) reversed from top to bottom.
So I just measure with the dipstick the distance from the top of the wort to the top of the kettle, and the dipstick tells me exactly how much is in the kettle. That way I dont have to dip the measure into boiling wort, and its realy easy to sanitise for cold measurement.

If anyone wants one of these, I can probably do something, but am really busy so it may take some time (plus I'm a lazy b@stard).
I would need your EXACT inside kettle dimensions and depth, all in mm.

If anyones interested, PM me and we'll work something out.

Cheers,
Grog

Thanks for the replies guys. A dipstick sounds like the go. Might have to get the bathroom scales and make one up.. Maybe some notches cut into a mash paddle handle would work?? (Saves an extra piece of kit)

Could take a while but I guess you only have to do it once.

Cheers, Mat.

matr wrote: Maybe some notches cut into a mash paddle handle would work?? (Saves an extra piece of kit)

Exactly the way I did it. Did it in five litre increments up to 10L then 1L from there on up. Didn't take all too long. I made the odd number of litre markings shorter than the even numbers for ease of reading, too.