Thin-walled vinyl tubing wort chiller...possible?

Ok guys, just an idea we thought about. Don't know if it has been discussed here or not. I did a search, but it didn't come up with anything. If someone knows of a thread please PM and I will ask to have this thread deleted. On to the idea.

Ok so my idea is to connect 50 or so feet of thin-walled vinyl food grade tubing to a barb connected to a ball valve on my boil kettle (of course this would be connected after flame out and I would have insulation or something around the ball valve during boil). I would then coil the tubing around the outside of a corny keg and run the other end into a carboy. I would fill the corny with ice water and place the corny with tubing in a rubbermaid trash can. It would also be filled with ice water. Once everything is in place, open the ball valve and let 'er rip. I had also thought about drilling some small holes in a piece a rigid plastic tubing and placing it in the end of the of the vinyl tubing to introduce some oxygen as the wort exits the tubing. Does this sound like a stupid idea (not enough heat transfer/HSA/etc.)? Any input would be great appreciated.

The reason for this madness is I'm a cheap bastard and have most of the stuff around the house. Copper is still $$$$ and I'm interested to see if this works.

I think that is a bad idea. First of all, vinyl is not safe to use at 212 deg. F. Secondly, polymers in general have very poor heat transfer properties. Just stick your kettle into an ice bath if you can't get a chiller.

I have to agree. Don't reinvent the wheel man, keep it simple. If you can't get a chiller (or make one) right now, I would search no chill... there are a lot of folks that do this with out incident.
Even if the tubing would work with heat transfer, you ice would melt too quick increasing yout costs and effort. Aplus for thinking out side the box, just not a good idea

Take a look at this site (scroll to the bottom). Vinyl cannot exceed a temp of 80 Celsius. You'd end up with wort all over the place. Not a good idea.

I've considered using vinyl in a reverse manner. Instead of as a wort chiller, but in combination with a copper wort chiller and immerse the vinyl tubing in an ice bucket as a pre-chiller and connect it to the copper tubing. No worries about high temps, just low temps. Couldn't hurt. Just sayin.

Thanks guys, maybe I will look into a wort chiller after all and maybe use the vinyl tubing as a pre-chiller as mentioned above.

Even thin walled vinyl wouldn't transfer heat very well, so I'm not sure how useful it would be as a pre-chiller either. Like he said, it can't hurt, but I got such poor performance out of a copper pre-chiller that it made me forgo the idea completely and simply pump ice water through my chiller.

plastic is a piss poor conductor of heat, don't bother.

RiverCityBrewer said:

Even thin walled vinyl wouldn't transfer heat very well, so I'm not sure how useful it would be as a pre-chiller either. Like he said, it can't hurt, but I got such poor performance out of a copper pre-chiller that it made me forgo the idea completely and simply pump ice water through my chiller.

Click to expand...

+1 even the copper pre chillers really don't work well. A vinyl pre chiller would be worthless.

Pumping ice water through a copper chiller is very effective.