Wort Chiller

[bj]

Hi, Im after some advice regarding the wort chillers.

I have just upgraded by kettle to be able to boil 50L, which means my old homemade immersion chiller will be inadequate.

My first thought is to make another larger IM, (maybe 15 meters?) and use my old one to pre chill my water. But im not sure if this method would bring the temp down fast enough?

The other options are to purchase a plate chiller or a counter-flow chiller, i have got an idea of the pros and cons of each, but was hoping to get some firsthand experiences from you good folk.
Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Brendan

[James P]

When I had my pump working I used a bin (probably a 50 litre) with ice and water. 2litre ice cream containers frozen then water. Cooled it down really quickly.

[JackoNZ]

I was thinking about this myself after brewing yesterday. I'm feeling guilty about how much water is wasted, especially from chilling. I don't have a pump so a recycled system is out the question but what about putting the water to use elsewhere?

Do top loaders have a sensor that tells them how full they are or are they programmed to just pull in x amount of litres? Certainly be keen to get a hot wash out of the first 5/10 minutes of wort chilling if I could do. I guess a couple of extra buckets mean I could re-use the water there for cleaning up later. Possibly even keep it for the next brew. If I got more copper I could at least do a pre chill which would cut down on water too.

Any other resourceful ideas out there?

[Chris Banks]

I have a 1 thousand litre rainwater tank which I run the water into from my immersion chiller from there
i use the water to water the hop garden etc.

The tank has volume markings so I have established that it takes 200 litres of tap water to cool 23l to 20c from boil.

Wouldnt like to pay for that directly when we get water meters!

I have recently aquired a pump so the next thing is try recirc to and from the tank whilst chilling and cut my chilling water loss to zero.

[Dale]

Yeah yesterday I recon I went through 130L for a 20L batch

[Michael]

I think most top loaders have a switch to turn off the water supply when its hits the mark needed. Some people in Aussie do this with their clothes washing since chilling their beer uses so much water. I guess you could always go no chill, but then the DMS issues may creep in.

Maybe one day it would be cool to make a valve, and split the water output to the bathtub first, followed by the washing. :)

[Dale]

So you did this right from 100C James? I recon I could fit 60-80L in the left over space in the fridge and have a dishwasher pump that I can use.

[James P]

Give or take a couple of degrees, but yes. Note that I probably had 5 2 litre bricks, and then added a couple more after a while. There was no ice left by the time I was finished!

[vdog]

I'm no mathematician, but as far as I can tell it depends on the temperature of your tap water, and the volume of your wort. The principle of heat exchange is that the two liquids try to equalise temperature by exchanging energy - so the amount of water you need is determined by what your temperature differential is (less any inefficiency loss).

As an example, to cool 30L of wort at 100C down to 20C, assuming tap water at 10C, you'd probably need around 90L of tap water. If you dropped that water temp to close to freezing you'd need less, but not by heaps. EDIT: according to Chris' comment above I might be being optimistic here, but it'll still depend on relative temperatures and how completely the energy is transferred from the hot wort to the cold water.

We generally run the 'out' tube from the chiller into our HLT and use it for cleanup, once that's full it's washing the cars and watering the vege garden (best to do that last one towards the end when the runoff isn't so hot!). I think we use about 250-300L or so to get 85L of wort down around 25C.

[Horace]

If you run the cooling water slower the discharge water will be hotter so carrying more heat away with it using less water but will cool the wort more slowly. If you run it faster the opposite applies.

[RickyP]

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere. I have looked by haven't had any luck and would be very happy with a grunt and a link.

I have gone down the 15m (12.7 OD) soft copper coil track. I've shaped it nicely to fit into my brew pot, but am stuck on attaching the hose to the immersion chiller.

I biked around various stores in chch looking for crux nipples and threads to braze but keep getting stuck with the 12.7OD thing (rather than 15mm)

Dejected I thought I'd just clamp my garden hose straight on and hope like stink it doesn't leak/burst, but found that my garden hose is 15 mm ID.

How have you all got around this?

(and done it so quietly?)


Thanks heaps in advance for any help that can be offered.

ricky

[studio1]

Denimglen also had a good solution for this - cut off a small section of 15mm pipe (I used some hard copper I had) and use that as a sleeve. The 1/2 fittings fit properly then.

[Andrew R]

+1 - I did the same thing. Got an old piece of syphon tubing to use as a sleeve and then I clamped on the garden hose over the top.