homemade chiller

I am thinking about building a wort chiller and was wondering if anyone has any experience using anything except copper. I know copper is great because of its thermal transfer properties but it is also very expensive right now. Has anyone tried aluminum or any other material? How well did it work?

my dad is a metallurgist. I ran this by him when I built mine. He said copper was the way to go. I built a basic immersion chiller and a pre-chiller that I put in an icebath to pre-cool the water before it hits the immersion chiller. Did both for about 60 including the fittings. Used 20 ft coils. Works great.

Thin walled stainless is being used by atleast some now and if that allows you to make a bigger chiller i think that would offset the thermal difference

Thermally silver is better then copper but i dont see anyone advocating that...(dunno how it would act with worth tho)

Make sure to fill the thin walled stainless with sand or water before coiling. Will support the walls and help prevent kinking.

What are the thermal properties of gold. A gold herms/chiller would definitly be bling!

A 20' coil of 3/8 copper is only $15 at home depot.

I used 1/2" stainless steel. I got it for free from work. We made a "drum" with a hole in it that could be attached to a threading machine. The threading machine would turn at a constant slow speed, and we we able to roll a 20' piece pretty easy. We made 2 coils, and then used 3/4" hose for our CF chillers.

3/8" x 50' copper tubing - $39
3/8" x 50' SS coil - $89

Edit: What's up with that Amazon tag?

From my electronics cooling experience, copper is what you want. If price is an issue, aluminum is cheaper but doesn't have the transfer ability of copper.

copper, aluminum, and stainless steel will all work just about the same for this purpose as long as the wall thickness isnt excessive. S.S. tubing may even have a slight advantage if you can find it with a very thin wall thickness. copper tubing is normally the most widely availble, and isnt too much more expensive than sourcing an alternative, so that is what is commonly used.

Wow thats a cheap copper tube
now if only international shipping was as cheap...

Stainless instrumentation is what i used. The tubing is pretty cheap, it is the compression fittings that are expensive. My friend at work, made one just like mine, and did a "test run" this past weekend, and brought the water from boil to 70 degrees in about 10 minutes. This was with recirculating the "wort" (water) back into the boil keg, and with the "wort" ball valve wide open.

I told him he would get better efficiency by slowing the flow of the "wort" down, and he shouldn't need to recirculate.

This ones about done - just need to sweat the fittings on. No reason this can't be fun.

otiscampbell said:

This ones about done - just need to sweat the fittings on. No reason this can't be fun.

Click to expand...

Looks like an alien from aliens

Who knows really, I just started going and ended up with some coiled up copper. Can't leave well enough alone I guess.

How many feet of tubing did you use to make that..novel...chiller?

Cheers!

sears.com, UT08025, 25ft of 1/2", $17.

It looks like the ends of your chiller are over the chiller itself. If so, and the connections drip at all, your wort could be contaminated at a bad time. Usually they "point" the opposite way, so that the connectors are outside of the circumference of the kettle. They also usually angle down a bit, so that any connection leaks run back down the hose and not into the pot.

Good one on the directional, I'll turn them.

50'. It's novel then is it- well here's to that.

neat design indeed. not sure if ive seen one like that before. im sure it will work just as well.

I really like that design. Plenty of space between the coils. How soft is that tubing? Someone else had said that it was soft enough to deform with finger pressure.

Thanks - design may be stretching it - more like monkeying around. I just started wrapping the tubing around a 4" piece of steel pipe I had in my shop. Ended up here.

As far as its softness - not even a little bit. Flexible enough to bend but fighting me - even last night fixing the inlet/outlet direction I had it laid over the radiator pipe! I'd have to look up what I got - it was originally for a CO2 injection project (not beer related).

I like that. I made mine a few years back and did 50' with an inner coil and a larger outer coil. 50' is prob overkill but what the hell. I have thought about cutting it into two and using a pre-chiller but i just finished a single tier system and will try it while recerculating the wort with the next few batches to see if it works better.

Out of curiosity do you run the cold from the bottom up or the top down? Does it make a difference? I would expect from the bottom up to be the answer but maybe not. I also realize this has nothing to do with the OP's question about copper versus anything else. Sorry to the OP. In my humble opinion this is just a big 'ol heat exchanger and the best material for that (according to scientific others) seems to be copper.

For efficiency sake I wonder just how well you could get one of these immersion chillers to perform? I know there are many who use pumps and plate and frame chillers - how long does it take to cool 5 gallons with one of those? I suppose my real question is - what is the fastest accepted way (for a homebrewer) to take 5 gallons from boiling to 80?

fwiw, my homemade IC uses 50 feet of 3/8" tubing and with my well water it can take 5.5 gallons of boiling wort to 68°F in 14 minutes flat.

Regardless of the type of chiller, much of the apparent "performance" depends on how cold the cooling water is. I am lucky to have a bedrock artesian well that delivers sub-55°F water year 'round, which can make any chiller look pretty good.

As for which side the cold water should enter an IC, it probably doesn't make much of a difference, but I have mine configured to go straight to the bottom then wind its way up and out.

I'm sure there are folks with 60 plate chillers or fifty foot long CFCs that can hit pitching temperature quicker than my humble coil of copper can, but otoh, I never have problems with plugging, and I leave my cold break in the kettle

Cheers!

Well 14 minutes flat is 5 times better than sitting in the ice bath. The engineer in me calls that a win.

Pushes the heat up from the bottom - yup.

Here's to leaving all that business in the kettle - I have to say I am really looking forward to that. Clearer beers haven't really been in my purview yet. Not that it has mattered, they have been good anyway.

I wonder (though not hard enough to do anything about) that the ideal immersion chiller would in fact be a triangular copper spiral? Maximize the contact area and all. It would be incredibly difficult to build, almost like a scale model of a screw, and you would need a pair of hydraulic commutators at the top so that you could use your Archimedes screw pump to move the wort inside the pot. Ok, maybe i do need to do this....

Made one with 20' of copper 1/2" and fittings from Lowe's. Price came out just below what it would cost to buy and ship from online brew store. It wasn't aesthetically pretty but gets the job done. Tap water in the summer is about 70+ degrees, but combined with ice bath, I can get to pitching temp in about 15+ mins.

I never really timed what it takes me to get from 212* down to pitching temps and yes the time of year changes how cold I can get it but I would say it was between 15 to 20 minutes or so, and this was before I built my stand. Now that I have a pump and I installed a return in the BK that will start a whirlpool I would expect the same times but less work on my part to either stir or agitate the IC to "mix". But I haven't used it yet so I can't really say how it will work.