Spike Electric Brewing System Progress

By scot in Home Brewing on Saturday, January 9th, 2021

Since I purchased the Electric Spike Trio System to be my next home brewing system, I have been busy prepping the new home brewing space. I have move all the “junk” that initially filled the space, cleaned the area to prep for painting, painted the walls and floor, hung some new lighting, purchased a stainless steel utility sink, and picked up a new wand faucet.

All this has been done in the last two weeks while I was off for the holidays.

The Space

Cleaning out the space to house the new brewing system wasn’t straight forward. I had to move the stuff from point A to B but point B was a mess. In order to get point B ready I had to go through everything there and clean a new space point C. Point C was junk that could be thrown out or consolidated. Point B had stuff that was sold off, given to charity, or thrown out. Many items that were initially at point A, actually found their way to point C.

Straight forward.

The items that we sold have netted as a smooth $105 so far. The items given to charity will help out with taxes. The items thrown out were to many to count, with many being large items and spread across multiple garbage pickups (ours allows us one oversized item per week) and neighbors.

That was a very messy endeavor but the family was a huge help and cut a process that had taken me a week on my own to only dent, down to a single morning of 2.5 hours of hard labor.

The new home brewing space prior to anything being moved.

Next was prepping the new space for painting: cleaning out cobwebs from the ceiling, walls, and nooks, washing down the walls and floor, and dislodging any loose cement fragments from the wall.

After cleaning, I actually switched gears and starting to hang lighting. My aging eyes needs lots of light to see well. I determined that painting would be easier with more light.

Up front I wanted to go with can lights as I had hung them in the rest of the basement and I liked the amount of light they gave off but there were some overhead pipes on the right side of the room that was going to make that difficult. I needed to take that into account.

My wife and I headed to the nearest box store to see what lighting they had to offer. After scouring their offerings for what seemed liked an hour, I settled on a single can light a 10K lumen LED shop light (right side of the room hanging from ceiling).

I hooked the lights into the existing lights in the basement which allows them to be controlled by the switch before entering this “side” of the basement.

Time to paint with plenty of light from the new lighting. We put down primer first. It was primer that was left over from other projects in the house. The one can was lumpy but when spread on the concrete wall it spread evenly. There was enough free primer to finish 80% of the floor.

My wife picked out the perfect colors: light gray for the walls and a darker gray for the floor. The floor space is only 110 square feet and we only purchased one can of floor paint. The hitch: the floor paint had sand in it. The consistency of the paint was paste. Thickest stuff I have ever seen or worked with but it went on easily and smoothly.

We had to scrape the sides of the can to have enough floor paint but it did cover. Glad we put down the primer. Note: the can light was replaced with another 10K lumen LED shop light. The shop lights are on low beam (they have two settings – the high beam hurts the eyes it is so bright).

Yes, I really liked those 10K lumen LED shop lights, I had to add a third to completely flood the brewing area with light, equally.

While the rearranging, cleaning and painting was being accomplished I was looking for a stainless steel utility sink and wand faucet. Looking them up online, for the quality that I wanted, made me come to the realization that used was going to be my best friend. Craigslist and Facebook market place to the rescue.

The Sink

My wife found a used stainless steel utility sink on market place only 20 minutes from the house. It came with a waste valve, horizontal leg braces, and the proper 8″ vertical faucet holes that I wanted.

Unfortunately, looking at the sink outside in a muddy, snow covered area of a 100 year old industrial park took me away from looking at the sink as carefully as I should have. After removing the stretch wrap from the legs I noticed that one of the leg joints (took me a long time to determine that is the correct name) was cracked. This allowed the sink to wobble a bit.

The leg braces and joints needed to be removed so that I could order the appropriate parts. Of course all the allen head screws were stripped. I watched a few videos and ended up buying a reverse drill bit that is made for pulling out such stubborn bits.

Removing the stainless steel braces from the aluminum leg joints wasn’t as straight forward as I thought it would. I had to clamp them in the vice to get all but one of them out. The last, I couldn’t get to budge, my entire workbench would wiggle when I tried to get it off the end. I used WD-40, de-greaser, and more to get it to loosen up. No such luck.

My neighbor refurbishes old metal for a living. I thought he could give me a boost in the right direction. A few minute chat with him and he was taking it to work the next day to cut it off with one of the specialized saws he had at the shop. It came out perfect!

Finding an online store that had the joints was more difficult than I suspected. Two places, that I physically called (another long story) either weren’t helpful or refused to help. I found the parts on webstaurantstore. Their customer service was outstanding and they earned my business. My hats off to them.

Cleaning the sink was a huge task as well. I used de-greaser and barkeep’s friend to make that old sink shine. Outside of a few dings and dents, it looked new.

The Faucet

One last component was needed for the sink to ready for installation: the faucet. The faucet took approximately 3 weeks of back-and-forth before I purchased it; mainly due to distance. But, when my wife had a business meeting halfway to Milwaukee, she knew what I was going to ask her. She is a great woman, as always, and happily made the extra 3 hours of driving to pick up a new in box faucet for way less than $.50 on the dollar.

The Cost

ItemPaidCost New*Savings
Spike Electric Brewing System$3500$6500$3000
Paint and Supplies$100$100$0
Lighting$140$140$0
Stainless Steel Utility Sink$225$300$75
Faucet$200$480$280
Total$4165$7520$3355
* Cost new includes shipping and taxes.

This is by far more money than I have spent on home brewing since I started some twelve years ago. This is a huge amount of money for my family but due to my inability to carry the liquid up and down the stairs anymore, this was one of a few ways I could continue my hobby.

What’s Next

There isn’t much left:

  • Plumber come in and install the sink as well as a place for me to hook up the chiller.
  • Electrician to come in and put in the 220 circuit and a few 110 circuits.
  • Move the brewery in place.
  • Test run.
  • Brew! Hopefully by the end of January.

Useless Fact: If your laptop feels hot, don’t put it in your lap if you’re a man, it may cause infertility.

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