My 5 gal boiler nightmare

I am building a recipe but can't seem to get all the beersmith mobile components to work together. My one limitation in size is my 5 gal boiler (this is getting resolved in 2 weeks), but since I am only trying to produce 2.5  gal batches it shouldn't be a bit deal in the end.

The problem I have is configuring beersmith so tha the mash profile matches the boil profile. I have everything setup so that I start with 3.5 gal in my boiler and end up with 2.5 in my fermentor; however the mas steps keep resulting in around 4 gal following mash and sparge. I faught with the grain bill and the mash profile for a few hours and finally decided that I can get 4 gal to work in the boiler but when I adjust the equipment profile to utilize 4 gal my gravity goes to hell.

what am I missing?

tried reducing the grains to 4 lb instead of 5, and my gravity got scewed again. It seeme to consistently say that I should be sparging with 2.48 gal and I don't understand what is impacting that.

Set the loss to trub & chiller to 0.

When trying to make smaller batches in your regular equipment, your loss to trub & chiller become a larger percentage of the whole. By setting that loss to zero, you just have to measure your post boil batch size, which should be the 2.5 gallons plus the trub. The Brewhouse Efficiency becomes the same as mash efficiency.