First Brew with New Coil!

Sunday April 5th was my first brew day using the new HERMS coil.  I did a Norther Brewer American Wheat kit.  I picked this kit because I wanted to try a wheat beer and also because of the simple grain bill for calculating efficiency.  The coil worked as expected but my first solo brew day brought to light some issues:

1. The MLT must be preheated.  I am guessing that with my previous outdoor brews the temperature was warmer which negated the need.  This time it caused me to come out low.  The initial temperature came out at about 146 instead of 152.  It took nearly 10 minutes of recirculation to bring it up to where it should have been. I plan to go about 6 degrees over in the future and stir it with the lid off until it reaches temperature. 
2. I still can not see into the MLT to place the recirculation hose properly.  Due to this and my unfamiliarity with the new high flow fittings, I managed to allow tunneling in the grain bed which brought my pre-boil mash efficiency down to 53 %!  The bad part is that I was not checking gravity readings in the boil kettle until it was too late. It also turns out that I did not have enough DME to make up the difference... When I pulled the MLT to empty and clean it, I discovered that the recirculation hose end was nearly half way buried in the grain bed.   To solve these issues I am going to purchase a clamp on mirror for the racking above the MLT and also will replace the hose with the recirculating mash kit from brewhardware.com. 
3. Recirculation must be done much slower.  After examining the grain bed during clean up it appeared that there were fishers caused from putting too much pull from the bottom side.  I plan to run at about 20% valve open next time.  
4. I did not account for the extra volume required for the new coil and the loss that occurred when I was connecting hoses.  This caused me to under estimate the amount of sparge water required. I kind of freaked when I was within .5 gallons of completing the sparge and the pump ran dry....
5. The body thermometer in the MLT seems to stick.  Flicking on the glass sometimes fixes the problem, sometimes not.  I plan to calibrate my spare and replace it. 
6. Even though I slowed my sparge considerably, it still only took about 35 minutes.  I am sure this did not help my efficiency and may have contributed to pulling the recirculation hose down into the grain bed.  Next time I know what to expect and will do a better job timing this process. 
7. It is VERY difficult to control the flow from the pumps using the ball valves.  When sparging I had the output pump set with the valve open by about 10% but the flow was apparently still to strong and the sparge ended about 20 minutes too soon!  I am going to take the advice I found in an online forum and start with the valve completely closed and move it about 1 degree at a time until I get a trickle in the boil kettle.
8. Even though the basement stays around 64 degrees , once the 70 degree wort was in the fermenter and pitched, the temperature very quickly went up to about 73.  I am guessing this was due to yeast activity.  I had never noticed this before because I had no way to directly monitor the internal fermenter temperature.  With the new thermowell and controller it is easy.  I now know that I need to bring the wort down to a maximum of 65 degrees before pitching.
9. I need about 25 lbs of ice to quickly cool the wort.  I had about 10 pounds and three small frozen water bottles.  This was not enough so I had to drain off 2/3 of the HLT water and refill with cold water from the sink.  Still I was only able to get it down to about 70 including the 20 minutes I let it settle out after the whirlpool.

Things that went well:

1. After reading quite a bit about water profiles I decided to use 1/3 filtered un-softened water.  I have not had a water test done but I know for a fact that our local water is extremely hard.  I know this because I once decided to brew with filtered un-softened tap water.  The result was so many deposits on the equipment, especially the boil kettle, that it took me a whole day to clean it all.   Rather than adding water salts back in to completely softened water, I thought this might be a good option.  We will see how it affects the beer but I do know that there were no deposits on my elements or the kettles.
2. I now know for sure that my boil-off rate when running the element at 80% is about 16% per hour.  In my previous tests I changed the setting a lot to try and find a boil level I was comfortable with.  Now I have a good base.
3. The MLT temperature held steady during the entire mash with only about .5 degree variance once I got everything dialed.  A 3.5 degree higher temperature in the HLT seems to be perfect.  Because my temperature controller does not allow less than 1 degree changes I will have to make the decision for the individual brew if I want it to be .5 above or below my mark.
4. It took about 15 minutes using the coil to bring the MLT up to mash-out at 168 degrees.  I learned that it is best to just set the HLT temperature controller to 175 and leave it.  It seems that the heat exchanger looses a bit if efficiency as the temperatures get higher so 7 degrees is not too much.  I plan next time to simply leave the lid off the HLT while rigging for sparge and adding a little ice to it if necessary to bring it down to 170 before starting.
5. The whirlpool seemed to work great.  The hot and cold break along with the Irish Moss collected in a nice cone in the middle of the boil kettle.

When I checked the fermenter this morning it was gently bubbling.  I am hoping that by this evening it will be in full swing and the ambient temp in my basement brings the temperature down a couple degrees....