BTUs for Crawfish

Thinking WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too hard.

Just look at how much fire you have on full blast and see if you think it's enough.

Get a jet and not a cadillac burner. Cadillac (banjo) type burners are slow.

Well I've had the burner for a while but just got the crawfish pot. I figured 100k was plenty until I started looking online and saw 200k and higher ratings. I am boiling for Mothers day and would be pretty let down if I couldn't get the water to boil

I guess it will just give me more time to drink while we wait for it to boil.

I must talk to people when I boil. My boils are a no jet zone.

New cooker being made by a friend for our groups use, so I will be done with burners for good soon.

Hope this helps...

All cast burners can produce approximately 54,000 BTUs. The jet burners can produce approximately 110,000 BTUs.


Here is a simple way to see how many BTUs you need for your pot size. Water density is 8.3 lb/gal. To raise 1 gallon of water (1 x 8.3 = 8.3 lbs) from 70 to 212 deg F in 1 hour you will need 8.3 x 142 = 1,178.6 BTUs.

Using this BTU requirement for each gallon of water you can figure out how many BTUs would be required to boil your pot of water in one hour. For example a 30 quart pot (7.5 gallons) (full) would require 7.5 X 1,178.6 BTUs = 8,839.5 BTUs to bring the pot to a boil in one hour, assuming 100% efficiency. Of course 100% efficiency isn't realistic. Assuming 100% efficiency a 54,000 BTU/hr cast burner should bring that pot to a boil in 8,839.5 / 54,000 BTUs = .16369 hours or 9.8 minutes. Anyone that has ever tried to bring a full 30 quart pot to a rolling boil knows that it doesn't happen that quickly.

How much heat is lost before it even gets to the pot is hard to calculate. Outside temperature and wind each can negatively impact the efficiency of the heat transfer from the flames to the pot. A safe estimate would be 50% efficiency, so doubling the heating time would probably be realistic.

Evaporation takes away heat and to hold a rolling boil will require additional heat besides that required to raise it to a boil. Without going into a technical explanation just take my word that boiling away 1 gallon of water per hour will require approximately 8,000 BTUs/hr.

So, a 54,000 BTU burner should comfortably boil a 30 quart pot in 20 minutes or less and comfortably hold that pot at a rolling boil. However, if you move to a 60 quart pot, the heating time doubles and now you are sitting around for 40 minutes or more waiting for the pot to boil. Somewhere between a 30 quart pot and a 60 quart pot you probably need to move to a jet burner which produces 110,000 BTUs and therefore cuts the heating time approximately in 1/2.

Be skeptical of BTU/hr output claims. There is no industry standard, so take wild ratings with a grain of salt.


LINK


ETA: Exactly what type of burner do you have?

As suggested earlier, a test run might be your best bet.

And don't turn the burner on before you have water in your pot. Sounds stupid but somebody on here has done this before. I remember reading it just cant remember who it was.

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Downshift and Alx agree on something? And they seem to be the only 2 in the thread who say no jet burner?

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I do not know why he is saying that, so I cannot agree that we agree.

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I'm a fan of the jet. We use a double jet,

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I unfriend you.