Closed Loop Wort chiller

Attached are some pics of my closed loop wort chiller. I have an existing glycol chiller I use for my beer lines and will add an additional pump to it to supply the closed loop chiller.

The 70qt cooler will house a 15 gallon chill water bath. At the beginning of the boil I'll activate the glycol pump to chill the water to near freezing then when it's time, recirculate the chilled water through the plate chiller and back into the cooler. The glycol chiller will continually cool the water as it returns from the plate chiller. No garden hoses or waste water to worry about and I can just leave it in place.

For my first run I'm just going to turn the pump on and let it go but intend to add a thermowell & Love temperature controller to control the glycol pump.

I am not farmiliar with how powerful a Glycol Chiller can be, but wont that be a heck of a lot of strain to put on one? Usually glycol only fights room temps, and you will be dumping quite a bit of heat into that water. Will the glycol be able to keep up? Please let me know how it works out

My chiller has a 3/4 hp compressor and a 12 gallon reservoir which I keep at around 28-30 degrees. Add to that the 15 gallon reservoir in the Igloo and there should be enough thermal mass there to handle a 10 gallon batch (although admittedly I haven't run any numbers to back that up) without the compressor working too hard.

This is the main reason I decided to share the load between two different sinks instead of running glycol directly through the plate chiller.

Used it for the first time and was able to chill 10 gallons of 175 degree wort to 65 with a 15 gallon reservoir of 40 degree glycol/water mix. Had slightly less luck on 13 gallons of 190 degree wort which I got to 80 degrees but I'm not sure the mix was precooled as much as it was with the first batch. I also had the wort pump wide open while I throttled the first batch.

I need to tweak it a bit but all in all it was a success and I plan to keep using it.

I've got a closed loop chiller. 17000 gallons of cold pool water and a submersible pump. Lots of heat capacity there. Not so good in the summer

Photos showing glycol power pack & cooler.

rvklein said:

Used it for the first time and was able to chill 10 gallons of 175 degree wort to 65 with a 15 gallon reservoir of 40 degree glycol/water mix.[...]

Click to expand...

How long did that take?

Cheers!

about 10-15 minutes.

^^^ Not bad at all...

Cheers!

The white plastic reminds me of Dexter... You sir are the Dexter of brewing.

I swear the blood on the wall is mine.

Looks good! My plate chiller will drop 15 gallons of 212 F wort to 70 in about 10 minutes using about 30 gallons of 55 degree water which I then use to clean the MLT and BK. all 3 of my pots are 25 gallon.

I tried to use a 1/2 hp aquarium chiller with about 10 gallons of reserve - no luck on that one....

I plan on adding valves so I can run the first 5-10 gallons from my sink into the pots for cleaning (or more for double batches) then finishing off with the closed loop.

And yeah, two heat sinks (my cooler & the glycol chiller 27 gallons total) make a huge difference. But mainly I couldn't have the wort chiller tied directly into my glycol power pack because it's cooling 100' of six product beer line too and I can't have warm beer!