[benjammin]

I recently bought a 24 quart stainless stock pot for extract brewing. the diameter is 14" and I have an electric home range that puts out about 15,000 BTU's. I was wondering if a pot with that diameter will hold a rolling boil on my home stove.

[Thirsty_Monk]

The easiest way it to try it and see.
Fill it with water and let it rip.
That should give you pretty good idea.
If you do not get sufficient boil you could use heat stick in conjunction with your stove.

[benjammin]

thanks. im going to give it a test run tonight.

[Thirsty_Monk]

If you want to know more about hearsticks check
How to Build an Electric Homebrewing Heatstick:
http://www.cedarcreeknetworks.com/heatstick.htm

[beerocd]

With a six gallon pot you won't be doing full boils, right?
I don't think your pot diameter has too much to do with it. Well, not at the level we're talking here. Yes, there's evaporation rate to worry about potentially, but that's too advanced. At least for me.

Here's a snippet I found on BTUs:(not my words)
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.


-OCD