Supercharging the Chiller

[RobB]

So if I'm brewing, I have space in my fermentation fridge, right? And if I have space in my fermentation fridge, I might as well use it to pre-chill water for my newly built immersion chiller. Thanks to a submersible pump and a 60 litre Ikea tub, I ran near freezing water through boiling water as a test and hit ale temps (18) in five minutes and lager temps (11) in seven. After one minute I was already down to 70 degrees, so whirlpool additions should be pretty interesting from now on.

I should note that my batches are slightly smaller than most on here and my test was on 16 litres of boiling water. However, the cooling water wasn't very hot when it exited the coils, so for a larger batch I think I could slow down the flow rate to achieve similar results without too much of a time penalty.

The tub and pump suit my set-up since my fermentation fridge is actually a baby chest freezer, but I can see this working just as well with little brown pumps drawing from the taps of a cube or two. Naturally it would work just as well in Plate and counter flow chillers.

Is anyone else pre-chilling their coolant in this fashion?

 

[xredwood]

I had planned on doing the same if and when I build a chiller. What sort of time was it taking you to reach pitching temps with tap water and how cold is your tap water? What length and diameter is your chiller? I live in Cairns with 30+ degree tap water so I will need cooling of some kind.

 

[dicko]

I have a 60 litre fermenter that I use with a submersible pump.
I have two twenty litre cubes that I have filled with water and keep in my lagering fridge and I set ice in those plastic dishes that chinese takeway comes in and on brew day I start the chill with tap water until it gets down to around 35 deg then I hook the chiller to the pump and pump the iced water through until The temp gets to what I want.
I can get to lager temps doing it this way or if ale temp is required I just stop at around 17 deg so when it hits the fermenter it is around 18 deg.
I did a brew yesterday and because the day was a bit cooler I hit ale temps without using any ice.
I usually only use a couple of Ice bricks for ales and 3 or 4 for lagers.
When I am nearly to the required temp I stop recirculating in the 60 litre fermenter and just pump the water back into the two cubes and put them back in the fridge for next time. No waste of water.
The hot water that originally comes from the chiller on the way to 35 deg, I use for cleaning up.
When I am recirculating the water through the chiller and back into the fermenter I direct the return onto the ice bricks so as not to heat up the water too soon.
I usually get 21 litres of wort into the fermenter and I am using an immersion chiller and my Braumeister has the temperature reading so I can stop at 80 deg for whirlpool hops and then continue when I am ready again to chill.
In my opinion, this is an easy way to get the wort to the required temp without too much fuss or waiting overnight to pitch yeast.

 

[hathro]

Which pumps are you guys using for recirculation?

 

[Eagleburger]

I have a 60 litre fermenter that I use with a submersible pump.
I have two twenty litre cubes that I have filled with water and keep in my lagering fridge and I set ice in those plastic dishes that chinese takeway comes in and on brew day I start the chill with tap water until it gets down to around 35 deg then I hook the chiller to the pump and pump the iced water through until The temp gets to what I want.
I can get to lager temps doing it this way or if ale temp is required I just stop at around 17 deg so when it hits the fermenter it is around 18 deg.
I did a brew yesterday and because the day was a bit cooler I hit ale temps without using any ice.
I usually only use a couple of Ice bricks for ales and 3 or 4 for lagers.
When I am nearly to the required temp I stop recirculating in the 60 litre fermenter and just pump the water back into the two cubes and put them back in the fridge for next time. No waste of water.
The hot water that originally comes from the chiller on the way to 35 deg, I use for cleaning up.
When I am recirculating the water through the chiller and back into the fermenter I direct the return onto the ice bricks so as not to heat up the water too soon.
I usually get 21 litres of wort into the fermenter and I am using an immersion chiller and my Braumeister has the temperature reading so I can stop at 80 deg for whirlpool hops and then continue when I am ready again to chill.
In my opinion, this is an easy way to get the wort to the required temp without too much fuss or waiting overnight to pitch yeast.

How much water do you need for 21L of wort? I am going to do the same and was wondering if 200L is enough.

 

[Mardoo]

I'm in the process of building something. I have some spare copper coil so I'm making a bird's nest in a 20 liter esky that fits into my freezer. I'm going to fill it with water and freeze it. Come brew day I will hook up the input from the tap to the pre-chiller and the output to my immersion chiller. I'm going to use it at the tail end of the process. Now I get from boil to about 45 in 10 minutes. It's the 45 to pitching that's the slow bit, taking about another 30 minutes. I'm hoping to cut that back to 10 minutes, so 20 minutes total cooling. Again, no proof this works yet.

 

[lael]

I'm in the process of building something. I have some spare copper coil so I'm making a bird's nest in a 20 liter esky that fits into my freezer. I'm going to fill it with water and freeze it. Come brew day I will hook up the input from the tap to the pre-chiller and the output to my immersion chiller. I'm going to use it at the tail end of the process. Now I get from boil to about 45 in 10 minutes. It's the 45 to pitching that's the slow bit, taking about another 30 minutes. I'm hoping to cut that back to 10 minutes, so 20 minutes total cooling. Again, no proof this works yet.

I was thinking about this too. Looking forward to hearing the results.

 

[dicko]

Here is a similar pump to what I use Submersible
Try ebay for cheaper versions for the same pump. I didn't use ebay because a mate ordered one that didn't turn up and the one I got was $10 cheaper than that one in the link. Many also use a small pond pump.


I haven't measured the amount of water required to do what I do but if your plan is to chill the 200 litres and then re use it, I would imagine that it would be enough.
Yesterday I did a brew that had whirlpool hops and I didn't measure the water that was surplus to my cleaning needs but it was only about 10 litres of tap temp water to get the brew to 80 deg (actual 79deg) then when cooling commenced again I filled the remainder of a 30 litre fermenter with hot water and then let the rest go down the sink until it got to 35.
I am now estimating ( guessing) the rest and it probably took around 5 mins at tap flow from when the fermenter was full so at average tap flow of 9 litres per minute it worked out at 45 litres wasted.
Next brew I will measure a bit more accurately if you want.

 

[RobB]

I had planned on doing the same if and when I build a chiller. What sort of time was it taking you to reach pitching temps with tap water and how cold is your tap water? What length and diameter is your chiller? I live in Cairns with 30+ degree tap water so I will need cooling of some kind.

I built the chiller and the pre-chill set-up at the same time, so I haven't tried it with tap water. However, I know you can't ever chill lower than your coolant temperature, which is a problem for most of the year in Perth unless you only ever brew saisons. I decided to go down this path after jealously reading forum posts from brewers in the northern states of the USA. They were getting fast and spectacular results with their tap water, but they had to dig their way through the snow to get to the brew shed.

Which pumps are you guys using for recirculation?

http://www.commercialelectric.com.au/pbc-350 This is similar to the one which Dicko posted, but not as powerful. That's not a problem, since I actually have to throttle it back. This one cost about $80. There are cheaper options out there, but this one had the hose fittings, valve and wiring all complete. I opted for the plug 'n' play option over saving $40. Water + electricity + amateur = bzzzzzzt! Pond pumps would be another option.

How much water do you need for 21L of wort? I am going to do the same and was wondering if 200L is enough.

Sounds like more than enough. I used 60 litres to chill 16 litres, so about 4:1. That's roughly in line with these figures from some drool inducing, high spec chillers: http://jadedbrewing.com/pages/chiller-comparisons

I'm in the process of building something. I have some spare copper coil so I'm making a bird's nest in a 20 liter esky that fits into my freezer. I'm going to fill it with water and freeze it. Come brew day I will hook up the input from the tap to the pre-chiller and the output to my immersion chiller. I'm going to use it at the tail end of the process. Now I get from boil to about 45 in 10 minutes. It's the 45 to pitching that's the slow bit, taking about another 30 minutes. I'm hoping to cut that back to 10 minutes, so 20 minutes total cooling. Again, no proof this works yet.

Sounds like a cool project, but I think you'll have to constantly agitate your pre-chiller coil to prevent an insulating layer of water from building up around the coil (that's why immersion chillers work so much better with stirring). For this reason, maybe several smaller blocks would work better than encasing your coil in a single block of ice.

 

[Mardoo]

Sounds like a cool project, but I think you'll have to constantly agitate your pre-chiller coil to prevent an insulating layer of water from building up around the coil (that's why immersion chillers work so much better with stirring). For this reason, maybe several smaller blocks would work better than encasing your coil in a single block of ice.

Yeah, that's occurred to me. It seems like a better idea to use cube ice to allow motility of the ice mass as it melts, but the whole point is not to buy ice. Honestly it's as much a curiosity project as it is an attempt to attain the functionality. I could always freeze in the esky without the coil and break up the ice. I've considered using some variant on Pykrete but I think the whole point of that is to slow down the phase transition as much as possible, which would consequently slow energy release/uptake, I believe.

I'm just messin' around, really. Which is odd because I usually CBF with projects having a probability of failure :huh:

 

[dicko]

Here are a couple of pics of mine....a very easy project

 

[TidalPete]

I do something similar to dicko but initially run bore water through the plate chiller. If I recirculate long enough I can get down to 24 deg c in the middle of summer but it takes a while.
Sometimes (mostly when doing lagers) I can get down to 10 or 11 (summer again) by disconnecting the bore when temp is about 30 or so & recirculating a minimum volume of tap water via an old esky containing an ice-cream container-sized block of ice or two through a $20 Bunnings pond pump.

Those cubes of chilled water are a good idea but I just don't have the fridge space most times.

I reckon you could compare the above with the info available for using a HEX coil efficiently.
That is, the smaller the volume of boiling water surrounding a HEX coil the faster you can raise the temp of your mash so conversely the smaller the volume of chilled water surrounding your ice, the longer the ice will last before it melts if you get my drift?
I usually sit the cooler at 45 deg from the horizontal with just enough water to cover the ice & pump inlet.
My 2 cents.

 

[dicko]

When I first made this I didn't have any ice made up so I went and bought a big bag from a fishing co op.
I used about half of it and forty litres of water from the tap and made a slurry.
That got the temp of the wort down to nine deg c. after I initially chilled it with the straight tap water through the chiller.
I need to add that on a bad day in summer my tap water is close enough to 30 deg but in the winter I can get down to ale temps no problem.
I will still use the ice in the winter as it saves a lot of water.