Tom,
None of my equipment is new.
I thought if my boil off was an issue my OG would be higher rather than lower, especially considering my pre-boil OG was exactly what I was expecting.
My volumes are close estimates based upon marks I dinged into my kettle. I have yet to make a dipstick for this kettle, but I might go ahead and mark my mash paddle which I also use for stirring my kettle.
I have a 1 gallon rubbermaid container that I have measured and marked 16oz increments on. I use that to make the final additions to my mash tun and kettle, but up to this point I have always assumed the 1 gallon bottled water jugs I use were indeed 1 gallon. I use the marks on my BK to confirm my volumes are close to what I need.
Sadly I recently found out my marks were a bit off on my 1 gallon container, but I have just (today) adjusted them using a reliable graduated container I got from the lab where I work. I will check my BK in the near future to confirm my dinged marks are reasonably close.
I did not record my post boil volume on this batch, but I did estimate my pre-boil to be 6.7 gallons based on my marks, and fermenter volume to be about 5.1 gallons based on the marks on the fermenter bucket. I have no way to know how much was lost to hop absorption, but I used 3ozs of pellet hops during the boil, so if you know how to calculate hops absorption that might help.
All of this aside, I'm not sure it's related to equipment because until I changed to the new software my gravity was almost always accurate within a point or 2. If it ever was off, I was able to confirm that the boil off was lower than expected and I had too much wort after the boil resulting in a lower gravity.
I am not completely excluding the possibility that I am making some error somewhere, but I can't see where that might have happened so I am thinking it might be one of the many new added configuration settings in BeerSmith.
Thanks for the response and I hope I can figure this out.
G!