Spinrathen

Recipes 

This thread has been very informative, thank you all for your contributions. I have recently moved to 5 gallon all grain after building a mash tun. I've been cooling thus far primitively with a big plastic tub and ice water. I'm over that situation. So on to my questions!

I've looked at a lot of builds and only seen 1 so far that has bare copper wire wrapped around the wort tube creating turbulent flow. Why don't more people do this? Does it make getting the wort tube in the water hose? Does it restrict the amount of water going through the chiller? If so has anyone tried remedying this situation by using a bigger hose? There has to be a reason why everyone doesn't do this. I would appreciate anyone with any experience to shed some light on this for me.

Thanks again!

Spinrathen

Recipes 

Update on my cfc. I went ahead with tacking bare copper wire around my 15' 3/8 inch od soft copper. It was very difficult to get it in the hose, I had to use a lot of dish soap and elbow grease, in the future I would look for a bigger hose if possible. Since I had the soft copper laying around already I used it, even though it is quite a bit shorter than most people are using.

It works amazingly, I cooled 5.5 gallons of 215 degree wort to 69 degrees using 58 degree tap water using a gravity fed system. I am very happy with the cooling capabilities of such a short hose.

CinciJeff

Recipes 

Just wanted to add a word of warning based on experience. Three costly mistakes:

1. I used a "heavy duty" orange hose from Wal-Mart. It tended to collapse on itself and onto the copper tube as I coiled the final assembly
2. I coiled the hose/tubing in too small a diameter. I used a keg as a form, and between the hose collapsing and the weak spots described below, this significantly diminished the flow rate
3. Wanting to increase the thermal conduction area of the copper tube and also space it away from the hose, I soldered a length of 14 ga. copper wire to the outside of the tube in a spiral pattern. While this worked to some extent, I believe it created weak spots (particularly where the wire started and ended) that contributed to kinking

Bottom line, it worked pretty well the first time I used it, even with the reduced flow rate. It cooled extremely well. The second time I used it (last week in 24 deg. weather) I had almost no flow and had to raise my kettle up really high to get it to work. I'm pretty sure I kinked it during transport/cleaning/etc.

I was going to give up and buy a Chillzilla but I've reconsidered. My next step is to cut off the hose and copper tubing, use good hose and a larger diameter, and somehow solder everything back together.

Lesson learned: Follow the tutorial closely and you'll be in much better shape.

I kinked tube is your enemy!

alien

Recipes 

I used scrap 3/8" OD copper water pipe for mine, which would have work hardened horribly if I had straightened it out. Some sections needed annealing before it could be worked at all. As I was coiling it back up I could feel it start to kink here and there, but it seems to have turned out OK in the end.

The only slight boo boo I made was forgetting to flux the outside of the coil before attempting to solder the tee assemblies on. I haven't noticed any pinhole leaks so far.

Here it is on top of my MLT. I went with stainless camlocks for the wort connections and polypropylene camlocks for the coolant lines. I think the red hot water hose is slightly niftier than run of the mill heater hose



Blog post: http://smokedprojects.blogspot.com/2013/02/cool-and-curly-counterflow-chiller.html#

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Magic Smoke brewhouse and grill

Automatic Smoker - Cooler MLT - Counterflow Chiller