I live in Florida so a chiller plate has its limitation. Especially with Lagers. I'm using an aquarium chiller to chill the water before it goes through the plate. My first try should be this Sunday. I can't wait.
Do you use that for fermentation temp controls? curious as to why you say it has its limitations, especially with lagers.
I live in FL as well and have been kicking around some design ideas in my head for a "2 stage" chiller.
Essentially I was thinking about building two of the common DIY wort chillers made from coils of copper tubing and connecting them together with some hose. I would drop the first chiller in a bucket of Ice water, and the second in my boil. I would then run fresh water from the hose through the coil in the ice water to drop the temp, and then through the second chiller coil in the pot in hopes of dropping the temp more quickly.
I'm sure I am not the first to think of this, has anyone with warmish ground water ever given this a shot?
If worst comes to worst I have a huge rubermaid barrel that I used for an icebath on my first brew. I could drop the pot in the icebath, run the 2 stage chiller and drop a frozen 2 liter bottle of water in the pot for good measure...
bja is right. It will not cool fast enough. It will cool, but from my test I would have to chill 90 gals of water below my target temp then pump it through the plate. Kinda defeats the purpose of making things easy. Back to the drawing board.
tampa911 and tally350z have got the only other solutions for hot states I have found or maybe I better look back at the MythBusters chilling a beer as fast as you can.
Thanks, I guess I'll keep looking at chiller threads. Water here in Texas is a precious commodity and I hate to waste it.
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