Ventilation

STEP 5: Mount the condensate hood

How you fasten the condensate hood to the ceiling of your brewery will depend on the material/composition of the ceiling in your brewery.

If your brewery ceiling uses standard joists made out of wood, you'll want to use lag bolts through the tile/drywall to fasten the panel directly to the studs for proper support. If the ceiling is concrete, use concrete sleeve anchors.

Our 12" high hood was installed flush with the ceiling as the room is only 7 feet high. This leaves approximately 15" between the tops of the kettles and the bottom of the hood. If your ceilings are considerably higher you may wish to use longer bolts to install the hood away from the ceiling and/or use a higher hood.

Again, every house and room will be slightly different so we can only give general guidelines and show what we did in our brewery.

Our condensate hood installed:

We used concrete sleeve anchors to fasten our hood to the poured slab in the ceiling of our brewery.

These anchors are designed to allow them to anchor into concrete, brick and block. You insert them into a hole that is pre-drilled into concrete. The nut is then turned to pulls the working end of the sleeve anchor up through the sleeve, and it expands and anchors itself securely in the concrete, brick or block.

If you've never used concrete sleeve anchors before and need to fasten your hood like we did, take a look at the video below by Bob Carlisle of ConcreteFasteners.com.

Concrete sleeve anchors:

As the nut is tightened the sleeve is pushed up and expands, holding the bolt in place:

Concrete fasteners installed, the hood is raised in to place:

The nuts are removed, bolts passed through the hanging brackets, and then the nuts are tightened:

The drain has a 1/2" NPT male fitting. A brass 1/2" NPT female to 1/2" barb fitting with vinyl 1/2" ID hose drains into the sink.
A hose clamp holds the vinyl hose to the barb fitting.