Counterflow Chillers

[Tim]

I am curently constructing a new counterflow chiller and I'ved found six metres nof Nylex 3/4 inch hose. Is this long enough for a CF chiller??

 

[ausdb]

I am curently constructing a new counterflow chiller and I'ved found six metres nof Nylex 3/4 inch hose. Is this long enough for a CF chiller??

[post="71626"][/post]​

It all depends on your entering tap water temp, if its cold enough then 6m should be ok. My chiller was made with 9m of 3/8' as thats what I had left over, the cold water entry/wort exit is on the bottom and the wort entry and waste water exit is at the top.

The outer shell of the chiller is at about tap water temp up to the third coil from the bottom (see the arrow) which roughly equates to 6m of useful cooling in the top 6 coils, the lower three are not really doing all that much. I plan on making a prechiller coil for the entering water to sit in a bucket of ice so I can get my leaving wort temps down a bit more in summer.

HTH ausdb

 

[Tim]

I plan on doing something similar using my old immersion chiller as a prechiller or using a pump to pump ice cold water through the CF chiller.
I guess six metres it is.

 

[ausdb]

I plan on doing something similar using my old immersion chiller as a prechiller or using a pump to pump ice cold water through the CF chiller.
I guess six metres it is.

[post="71640"][/post]​

I would go the prechiller option, unless you have a crushed ice bank water circulating past large blocks of ice then inot a cooling loop does not work all that well.

 

[Tim]

I was thinking of using a few 2L blocks of ice to cool ~35L and then pumping this into the CF. The hot waste water gets pumped into the swimming pool, or back into my HLT for washinh up.

 

[Aaron]

My CFC is 6m long and does the job just fine. In winter it gets the wort well down below ferment temps. In summer I have to slow the flow a littl and thus it takes a little longer but still works fine.

 

[ausdb]

You will use up 35L of water pretty quick through a counterflow.

Better to crush the 2l blocks of ice up in a bucket with a little water so you have a nice slurry, sit your immersion coil in it and run your incoming water through it. Have a search through the thread called Perth brewday to pics of Goats setup. He runs an immersion coil in the kettle with a large plastic crate filled with 10L frozen plastic water bottles in it. It takes a long time to get the ice in the bottles melted.