Hell on Earth Wort Chiller

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beerthirty

big beers turn my gears
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Podunk, VA. Not far from the NC line.
I mentioned my plans to modify my chiller in another thread and said I would post results. Ater the beer evaporated I realized that the other thread was an IC thread so decided to post here. My ambient temps run about 105* and tap temps are 85* making it difficult to cool the wort fast enough for a good cold break or get to pitch temps within a reasonable amount of time(was taking 1 hour to reach 80* which was not satisfactory). this pic is after the build
DSCN2274.jpg


I built it in a bucket to make it easier to move around and to contain the ice. A 25' coil of 3/8" tubing(secondary coil) was placed in the bottom and one end passed through a grommeted hole(outlet). I lowered the CFC around the secondary and pushed the inlet and outlet cooling hoses through the bucket and clamped them in place. Then clamped a tube from the wort outlet on the CFC to the inlet on the secondary coil. The whole bucket sits below the kettle so it can gravity flow through both coils(although I use a pump on the outlet side to pull the wort clear of the coils). Both coils flow top to bottom to help gravity/ siphon effect. crushed ice will be poured into the middle and outside the secondary coil(ice will be added as needed, I don't plan on more than 20 lbs.) The cooled wort will come out the red capped tube on the bottom right of the pic. this pic is after testing showing the remaining ice from 18 lbs of crushed ice
DSCN2277.jpg

This mornings ambient was a cool blissful 96* and tap temp was running 82* During testing I let it gravity flow for the first 4 gallons and used the pump for the next 4 gallons. The water(wort) temp going in was 210* throughout the test. During gravity flow the temp started at 40*then settled at 54*. when the pump was turned on at full flow the temp climbed to 78*. I was able to reduce the full flow temp to 68* by rocking the bucket to help settle the ice around the secondary coil to get more contact between the melting ice and coil. The time to drain 8 gallons of water through the chiller was 12 minutes. This time will be reduced because I plan on using a pump instead of splitting between gravity and pump. I tried gravity to see the difference in temps that forced flow vs gravity would make. Results: the Hell on Earth Wort Chiller works great! It will allow boiling to pitch temps in a single pass under 15 mins for 10 gallon batches using only 2 bags of ice. :ban:
Draining the chiller after use will be simple. Disconnect the small hose connecting the primary and secondary coils, turn the chiller upside down and blow air through the wort oulet and the coolant inlet. I hope this helps any who have problems cooling their wort.
 
If you top off the bucket with water after filling with ice, you'll get better performance. You essentially only get partial contact area between the copper and ice otherwise.
 
I think I get it. Is this a CFC and an reverse IC (wort inside) back to back in a bucket?
 
Bobby, thanks for your input. I thought about adding water but wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be using a lot of ice. I was worried that the water would melt the ice before the job was done. With the amount of ice left over that fear was unfounded and I will be adding some water next time.
pldoolittle yes I guess you could call the secondary a reverse IC. the wort flows from top to bottom in the CFC, then straight up to the top of the secondary coil(reverse IC)where it flows through the coil on the way back down. the plumbing idea was two fold. 1)with one short uphill travel less wort would get trapped in the coils(the weight of the wort going down in the secondary would pull it up the short straight uphill. 2) as the ice melted it would collect cold water around the lower portion of the secondary coil reducing the wort temp further.
As Bobby mentioned it will probably be even more efficient with ice water bath vs just ice.
 
Beerthirty,

Without a scale I can not judge dimensions, but would a frozen 2L bottle ice block(bottle cut away) fit into the center of your copper coil?

This might help on the amount of ice.
 
In the end, you actually want all of the ice (potential energy) to convert all of that coldness to the wort.

In an ideal picture perfect world, your wort would be at it's desired temp and all of he ice would be melted. You would have used the least amount of ice to reach your target and would be 100% efficient on your given piece of equipment.

Obviously that's easier said than done, so it is better to have a little left in the tank than not (unmelted ice).

Smaller cubes transmit their energy more quickly than blocks.

Also, consider uring salt.
 
olllllo said it all there. I dont think there will be a need for salt because I can hit desired temps in a single pass with ice left over. It is as close as the kitchen though if problems arise. next time I do plan on putting 6" of water in the bottom of the bucket with the crushed ice. Instead of rocking the bucket to settle the ice I might just put the stir spoon inside the secondary coil to push the ice down.
 
The deal with the water being added is in fact designed to melt the ice. As the ice melts, it brings the whole volume of water down to near freezing. It won't ever get there because the wort is add heat. However, without the water, ice that is nowhere near the coil just sits there doing nothing.
 
adding water allows full contact to the coil adding salt to the ice water allows it to cool quicker and lower then what would be normal. think the cheap fast method of cooling beer in a hotel room on spring break. bags of ice/bathtub/beer/salt

fill bathtub with beer add ice pour salt over ice add water. wait 7 min and ice cold beer ;-)
 
One of the best heat transfer fluids on the planet is water (and molten salts but that is more of a chemical engineering thing than a homebrewing thing). As others have pointed out you want all of your ice to melt thereby absorbing the latent heat of fusion from the wort. Ice works because of phase change not because it is cold. It takes 4.814 Joules to heat (or cool) one gram of water 1C but it takes 333.55 Joules to melt one gram of water (change from 0C and solid to 0C and liquid).
 
A little clarification to avoid others not as geeky as us getting confused.

The latent heat of fusion is the energy required to convert water from ice at 32°F to liquid water at 32°F. That's what ChemE meant by phase change.

So, cooling 5 gallons at 100°C (212°F) to 70°F (21°C) requires that you dissipate 7,113,243 joules of energy. i.e. Melt 47.5# of ice. That's not very feasible, so we better find a way to get rid of that extra energy. Hence the need for for the IC

Assuming we just melted 16# of ice, we have 4,719,131j more to get rid of. Break out the IC...
 
Linked here from another thread. This is essentially what I'd thought of as well, you are using a post-chiller for your wort, this one is just all combined in one bucket. At this point I think my plan will be similar, but have the CFC sit on top of the bucket, and only have the bare copper coils of the secondary chiller inside the bucket. I like this since it will be assisted with gravity through the whole system (no tubes going back up) and the ice will not be melted by the warmer tap water going through the hose and all the cooling power will be directed at cooling the wort in the bare copper coil.

The only other difference I think I'll make is adapt it so that I can run boiling wort through the whole system for the last 10 minutes of the boil to sanitize everything really well, then I'll dump in my ice and water in the bucket, and start transferring wort to the fermenter.

I'll make a thread with my version when I'm done. By the way for some reason I am not able to see any of the pictures in this thread, any chance you can attach a picture instead of linking?
 
Just to pump up the nerd factor of the thread, wouldn't all the energy from the phase change now be stored in the cold water and therefore still available to cool the wort (and more readily because of better contact?)? So you shouldn't really worry about the added water melting the ice, right?

I consider myself pretty sharp, but this forum constantly teaches me new things.
 
Yes as the ice melts it will cool the water, which then should cool the copper tube. The other issue is you will have ambient heat coming in through the walls of your bucket, perhaps this is best built in a 2-3 gallon cooler of some type, but that's going too far, you won't loose too much in the few minutes used to cool the wort.

I plan on having a 5 gallon bucket of water sitting in my fermentation freezer at 34 degrees that I'll use with ice in the cooling bucket. I'm usually done with my last brew fermenting, or crash cooling it for transfer at that point.
 
I felt that rubber was a pretty good insulator so there would be little temp transfer through the rubber hose. I put it all in a bucket for convenience in carrying it to the brewsite. The small uphill travel from the CFC to the secondary is negligible due to the fact that the weight of the wort traveling down through the coiled secondary is far greater than the weight of the wort traveling uphill. Thus flow through the secondary coil pulls the wort up the small uphill climb.
Sach made a point of the 12 minute pass. This is with a pump. without a pump it still gravity flows quite well but a little slower. It also drops the temps to lagering range.
I will try to attach a couple pics. I'm still learning the basics.

Con, I couldn't locate the manage attachments button but I did put them in my gallery. hope that helps
 
I would avoid using salt in this - no real need for it, and it has a strong tendency to corrode your copper. However, it certainly is benefical to use pre-cooled water, since warmer water will just use ice.

:off:In running an ice cream freezer where you really do need the salt, and just have to deal with the corrosion over time, it is HUGELY beneficial to have a gallon (or slightly less, depending) of extremely salty water stored in a freezer - cuts the time needed to freeze a 4 quart batch in half, at least. Lay in ice and salt as usual, then pour in enough pre-cooled brine (at 0F or whatever your freezer is set to) until it overflows and things move right along, rather than having to wait until the brine makes itself from ice and salt. At the end of freezing, collect a gallon of the brine, and add to it any un-dissolved salt - you want this brine to always be saturated with salt, with extra salt on the bottom.
 
BeerThirty - Thanks for the pictures and info, I appreciate you posting this and sharing ideas on it. I'll be building my own version of this and using it in my system. Unfortunately I won't have the new system up and running for a while since I am building a brew rig in my garage (natural gas, pump etc) but when I do have it done and running I'll post some pictures and performance information (like you have).

The other nice thing about this setup is that since the cooling ice/water has little chance of dripping into the wort (like some ICs do) I will probably just shovel some snow into the bucket in the winter (if getting it down to lager pitching temps) since even then my city water is not at lagering temps. In the summer it will be great to just pump right to the fermenters and pitch the yeast.

I'll need to rig up something to easily see the temperature of the outflowing wort, then I can adjust the pump speed accordingly, currently I was just holding a sanitized digital thermometer in the flow.

I felt that rubber was a pretty good insulator so there would be little temp transfer through the rubber hose. I put it all in a bucket for convenience in carrying it to the brewsite. The small uphill travel from the CFC to the secondary is negligible due to the fact that the weight of the wort traveling down through the coiled secondary is far greater than the weight of the wort traveling uphill. Thus flow through the secondary coil pulls the wort up the small uphill climb.
Sach made a point of the 12 minute pass. This is with a pump. without a pump it still gravity flows quite well but a little slower. It also drops the temps to lagering range.
I will try to attach a couple pics. I'm still learning the basics.

Con, I couldn't locate the manage attachments button but I did put them in my gallery. hope that helps
 
another good reason for NOT using salt, if you can be effective with out it, is that you
can then go water the grass with the water when you are done...
don't do that if you used salt...
then dump it in the neighbors yard.


and my apologies if someone else already said that and i missed it...
 
Well I still need to find a good way to use the water that will be going through the CFC. My mash tun is already cleaned by that point since I do that during the boil. I could put some into the HLT to use to clean the lines and the boil kettle, maybe more into a 5 gallon bucket to clean up random brewing stuff. I don't really want to try to keep the water for the next brew since it will be going through a garden hose.
 
I have not used salt and even in the AZ desert haven't had a need to with the ice.
We used a digital infared to measure instant temps. An addition I've made to my HOE Chiller is this https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/inline-o2-injector-76613/ It cut one more step out of the process.
Ok so I'm a bit wasteful. My CFC waters the street, but only for about 15 minutes.
 
Sorry no more pics. I was working with a mental image of what I was after so didn't take the time to snap pics during construction.
I clean it after each use by sending the oxyclean that was soaking the BK through it and then rinse with another 5 gallons of water. To sanitize it, 15 min from end of boil I recirc boiling wort through it before hooking the hose up or adding ice.
 
I have been using a 30 plate lately instead of the H.O.E. chiller. While the H.O.E. worked very well with the high ground water temps in Phoenix, I got tired of going out at 5 am on brewday to buy 20 lbs of ice(you have to start brewing early here if you want to get inside by 120*). The 30 plate worked very well, but science wouldn't allow me to get around the actual ground water temp being higher than pitch temp. Damn it, I want single pass chilling, faster, cheaper, greener. Its too hot out here in the summer to be wasting time draining through a 1/4 ID tube. So a new plan is in order.
Using ideas from kladue and Yorg I have designed in my mind an advanced chiller option. It would consist of two plates, a 5G(40lb) ice bank built inside a cornie, and a water cooler refrigeration system as a reservoir.
Coolant would flow from the reservoir through the ice bank into the secondary plate. This would drop the temp to between lagering and ale pitch temps. From the secondary plate the coolant would flow to the primary plate which would do the brunt of the work dropping the temp of the wort to around 90*. Then the coolant would flow back to the reservoir to remove some heat before going back to the ice bank for the remaining cooling before reircing through the system again.
The coolant temp going into the primary plate would be no more than 80* dropping the wort temp to about 90* or less. The wort would travel through the secondary plate to drop the pitch temp to between lager and ale. I didn't just pull these #s out of my a$$, while testing my porn last weekend I noticed that coolant flow output temp was very close to summer GW temps making me think that by adding another chiller and reducing coolant temps I could make a closed system which would chill and reduce wastewater.
The purpose of the water cooler is to lower the temp of the coolant so the ice bank wont melt to soon. After all I'm trying to build a mobile automatic rig. A cornie will be used for the ice bank because as the water/salt solution freezes in a cylinder it will push up instead of splitting the container. Also a solid block of ice wont melt as fast in the desert heat as would crushed or cubed. At this point many of you will say that solid ice wont cool as quickly as crushed, cubed. The ice bank will have a 20" coil inside that the coolant will flow through. I need the bank to last 4-5 hours in 120* weather before use that is why I'm working with a solid ice bank vs cubed or crushed. The 20' coil should reduce the coolant temp to that of the salted ice.
I have had a few during the conception and planning of this new design so I welcome all criticisms about why this wont work or improvements you would make.
 
You mentioned a pump, is that a march pump? I don't really see how it could get from the bottom of the cfc up to the top of the IC then down and out could work w/o a pump. Unless you have a staggered height w/ the cfc below the kettle and the chiller a couple feet lower.
 
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