Question on wort chillers

I have an immersion chiller 5/8 OD copper about 10 inches tall. My idea: Wort from kettle into chiller which would be submerged in an ice bath in a cooler and then into fermentor. Anyone done this? Its kind of like a half counter flow. Any concerns ?

Never tried, but it sounds like it could work well. My only concern, as with all chillers that you run wort through, is getting an infection in there and not knowing until you get an infected batch.

My big concern would be that the ice bath would not cool enough and would melt before much of the wort makes it through. I tried having my cold tap water run through a small immersion chiller in an ice bath before it went to the big immersion chiller in the pot. The ice bath melted into lukewarm tap water in under 2 minutes.

If I were you, before I ever got it near wort, I would test it by running hot tap through your chiller in an ice bath and see how much of your fermenter you fill up before it all melts (and see how cool it actually gets the water in the fermenter, too).

One huge benefit to immersion chillers is the ability to clean them easily. That said plenty of people use cfcs so if you stay on top of it then that'd work. Whether it'd be more efficient idk, but add salt and stir the ice water to help.

Btw a lot of people use a small immersion chiller into an ice water bucket like you describe and then into a normal immersion chiller to pre chill the tap water.

FYI
Tested last night with 12 gallons of water from the keggle boiling. Was able to crash to 65 at the outlet of the chiller that was submerged in cooler full of ice water all gravity fed attm. I could control the temp by controlling the flow of wort through the chiller. I plan to use PBW/oxyclean to clean system and starsan for sanitzing the system. This is all extract for now but will step up to a/g before too long.

Seems to me it would be safer to run ice water through the IC than to run wort through it. My tap water is 58 degrees and chills 5 gallons to under 100 degrees in about 7 minutes. No way I would risk running wort through it.

phuff7129 said:

Seems to me it would be safer to run ice water through the IC than to run wort through it. My tap water is 58 degrees and chills 5 gallons to under 100 degrees in about 7 minutes. No way I would risk running wort through it.

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This.
You could chill with tap water until temperature drops to 100F, after that recirculate water trough IC from ice bath. I used this system before and it worked great during summer.
Cheap aquarium pump will do the job.

Remember that the tubing that comes with most ICs is NOT rated for hot wort. You will leach chemicals from the tubing if you run hot wort through it. You really need to replace the factory tubing with silicone tubing in your chilling scenerio.

Tubing is Silicone