DIY Interwoven "Rib-Cage" Immersion Chiller

I would but I spent SO much ruining 50 ft of copper and buying it twice. I only used it once and it worked great. Second time was the charm. If I messed that one up Id of bought one off ya. And yeah I think patenting is that simple, pictures of the end product and a note to explain the process. Copyrighting is that easy. Idk

Picobrew said:

For something like this, a patent would require a decent amount of writing and diagramming. You also have to really understand the prior art.

Anyways, I need a chiller! How much do you think one of these would set me back? I have a 40qt giant stovetop pot that is pretty tall.

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Well, depends on what you want specifically:

25' of 3/8" tubing (not likely to do a whole lot for you - probably 15-20 minute effective cooldown) - 353in²
50' of 3/8" (most likely too much copper to fit in your pot) - 707in²
25' of 1/2" (probably your best bet) - 471in²
50' of 1/2" (I'd reserve this beast for a 60qt pot/keggle) - 942in²

Faucet or hose hookup?
How long for the input hose, how long for the output?
Inside width of your pot?
Height of the pot?

I can confidently say though, that it shouldn't cost more than $50 in materials, plus shipping. These things really don't take me long to put together so I would charge nothing for labor on yours. Or you could donate $5 toward a membership to me or whatever, but please not like the whole thing. I wanted these to be more efficient and cheaper to buy than standard IC's. Its the principals of the matter.

Reference specs of mine:
22' of 3/8" tubing
10' input and output hose
Faucet thread to hose thread adapter + hose thread to barb fitting for input side.
Stands tall enough to exit 32Qt turkey fryer pot.
Cools from 212* to 70* in 9-10 minutes with 42*F input water.

Well, I made one of 50' 3/8" copper. I am going to boil her tonight and see how she does. If I can get 10 gal down to 70 in around 15-20 min I will be more than Happy!

Depending on input temp you should be able to do it in 10 minutes still. You are using more than twice the copper I am, on only twice the wort. I think you will be impressed.

i just made my first batch last night with a brewers best kit, and i was instructed to only boil 2 gal, so i did. Of course, following with murpheys law my propane was tapped out after 20 min of boiling, so it all got brought inside. If i did the full 5 gal, by ****ty stove couldn't keep a boil. back to topic, i had a massive ss pot that i could barely reach in between that and the hood fan, and that giant chiller in it and i feel that i cooled my 2 gallons in the time i turned the hose on outside and walked back in. I guess it wasn't a accurate test because 90% of the chiller wasn't submerged, but i wanted to say that i was very pleased. While cooling i actually spread the coils a little so there's barely a square inch in that pot that doesn't have a copper tube cutting through.

^ = good design, very happy.

oxiderush said:

i just made my first batch last night with a brewers best kit, and i was instructed to only boil 2 gal, so i did. Of course, following with murpheys law my propane was tapped out after 20 min of boiling, so it all got brought inside. If i did the full 5 gal, by ****ty stove couldn't keep a boil. back to topic, i had a massive ss pot that i could barely reach in between that and the hood fan, and that giant chiller in it and i feel that i cooled my 2 gallons in the time i turned the hose on outside and walked back in. I guess it wasn't a accurate test because 90% of the chiller wasn't submerged, but i wanted to say that i was very pleased. While cooling i actually spread the coils a little so there's barely a square inch in that pot that doesn't have a copper tube cutting through.

^ = good design, very happy.

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Damn nice to hear man!

Again, to reiterate for those just glancing at the last few pages, standard chillers don't work, in my opinion, as well because the coils are so close together that in effect, the coil below is trying to cool the same wort that the coil above has just cooled due to convection currents causing the cooling wort to fall over a cold mass and thats not mixing hot and cold wort. Hence the reason for the spaced coils. Lots of coverage of the wort, minimal amount of materials, same or better cooling than vertical column coolers.

here's another way to do a "rib-cage" style chiller that has a way of evenly distributing the cold over the available surface area of the copper

WOW that looks like ALOT of soldering! MAN, did you drill holes in the big pipes and solder? that must have taken forever! Is it really worth the chill rate compared to the regular IC?

RedIrocZ-28 said:

Anyone want to buy one off me? I'll give you a killer deal.

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I think you could easily sell several dozen of these things to HBT members. I may be interested once we find out what job my wife will be assigned to in the summer (complicated story, but it does affect the family's bottom line).

Could you PM me a cost guesstimate on a 25' of 3/8" chiller with kitchen faucet hookups, 4 ft of input hose, 6 ft of output hose for a 22-qt pot 11 3/4 in inner diameter and 12 in tall?

***Public Service Announcement***

When trying out your massively over sized chiller in a tiny 2 gallon boil, make sure that after you check for leaks, empty it out, or you will drop a lot of cold into a boil that's struggling on it's own already on the stove. not that i did that or anything.....

Beau815 said:

WOW that looks like ALOT of soldering! MAN, did you drill holes in the big pipes and solder? that must have taken forever! Is it really worth the chill rate compared to the regular IC?

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Yeah there was a bit of work involved, and there is a risk of joints breaking due to rough handling, but if you test the system before putting it in the kettle it's not anything to worry about. As far as the efficiency, it does out perform a straight line system.

EDIT: There are more photos of this in my profile gallery including the build

Look at it in terms of temperature disparity: The heat is removed because of the temperature difference between the chill water and the hot wort. Copper is a great medium because it transfers heat quickly. So if you were to measure the temperature of the water in the chiller as it flows along the line, it heats up (absorbs more heat) as it moves down the line. If it takes 5 feet for 50 deg F water to heat to 200 deg (I'm supposing for the sake of explanation) and your chiller length is 25 feet the water stops removing heat after the 5 foot mark. So the rest of the way, it does nothing... basically equal to one chiller with 5 feet of pipe. Now imagine 20 - 5 foot chillers chilling at the same time - way more efficient. I've got 18 - 3 foot x 3/8 dia. "ribs" that flow evenly. I distribute the temperature disparity over a greater surface area more quickly.

heat flow rate = thermal conductivity (in k)× temp difference (in k) × area / length

Copper = 385.0 Thermal Conductivity, k (in unit of W/m·K)

There's the equation if you feel like doing the math.

oxiderush said:

***Public Service Announcement***

When trying out your massively over sized chiller in a tiny 2 gallon boil, make sure that after you check for leaks, empty it out, or you will drop a lot of cold into a boil that's struggling on it's own already on the stove. not that i did that or anything.....

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I begin the boil with the chiller in place - this gets rid of that problem

yeah, it's a pain to stir with it in, so im just going to put it in empty 15 min before flameout for sanitation.

It seems like you would need ALOT of water pressure in order to disperse down the big channel while filling all the outer coils with pressure leaving thru each one, then up the center channel and thru all the inner coils. i would think the inside coils wouldn't get much running water especially near the top.

Beau815 said:

It seems like you would need ALOT of water pressure in order to disperse down the big channel while filling all the outer coils with pressure leaving thru each one, then up the center channel and thru all the inner coils. i would think the inside coils wouldn't get much running water especially near the top.

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If you look closely, the outer coils on the left, enter on the inside on the right and vice versa... this ensures equal pressure (the flow on the first rib is the same as on the last, because they exit in the opposite order. also, the flow rate drops as the water enters the ribs, which gives the copper adequate time to exchange the heat....

sounds good!

Seabee, how fast does your setup bring boiling wort to 70*? And as important as that question, whats the water input temp?

RedIrocZ-28 said:

Seabee, how fast does your setup bring boiling wort to 70*? And as important as that question, whats the water input temp?

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Depends on the temp of the chill water... In summer w/ 50 deg F water used to chill from 212 deg F down to 100 deg F, then switching over to a recirculated ice bath, I can get 5 gallons to 68 in under 7 minutes.

Now that I've gone to 10 gallon batches, (I haven't used an ice bath with 10 gal yet) but it takes a little under 20 minutes for 11+ gallons to go from boil to 68 deg F.

I used my chiller that i modeled after your RedIroc, chilled 8 gallons of wort to 70 in about 15 min. Very nice!

jimba, thats quite a feat. Did you do a waterbath and the chiller? Like I put my pot in my sink and use the spent water from the chiller to circulate around the outside of the pot so I get a double usage from my water.

Got any pics? How long did it take you to make it?

I just used the chiller, water out of the tap right now is around 45 deg. I tried to download pics from my phone, no luck. I have a 15 gallon mega-pot so there is no moving that sucker until it is empty! I used 50' instead of 25' because of the diameter of my pot, fits like a glove! It took all of 20 min to make, your directions helped A LOT! I am going to hijack the office camera at lunch and try to snag a pic!

edit: how do you get all of the water out of it or is there always some in there?

Turn it upside down and suck on one of the hoses to get the flow started, make sure the hoses aren't kinked in any way. It seems that the water likes to stay in the tubing, I noticed that too.

finally able to post the thing!

jimba009 said:

I used my chiller that i modeled after your RedIroc, chilled 8 gallons of wort to 70 in about 15 min. Very nice!

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How long did it used to take and what method did you used to use?

I used to do the old ice bath trick until I bought a 15 gallon pot! It took at least 30 min to cool 5 gal of wort, way to long in my humble opinion.

jimba009 said:

I used to do the old ice bath trick until I bought a 15 gallon pot! It took at least 30 min to cool 5 gal of wort, way to long in my humble opinion.

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I ran into the same problem at the beginning of my IC project, what I discovered, was that due to the dynamics of temperature disparity, it worked better if I chilled with tap water down to 100 deg F. and then finished with the ice bath.... that changed from a 25 minute process down to like a 11 minute process.

RedIrocZ-28,

tried to send you a PM, but it said your storage was full.

Yeah, I am having this moral dilemma about upgrading membership because it costs $25. Thats 1 batch of wonderful beer. Decisions decisions....

I cleared it out. send it quick before I get enough to fill it up again today...

I built a chiller using this design and it works fantastic. Boiling wort to 67 or so degrees in under 20 minutes. At 11 minutes it was under 80 degrees. Well worth the effort to build this. I would recommend it to anyone. I used about 30 ft. of 3/8 in. tubing. I tried to insert a picture but I guess I can't figure that out

Use photobucket to upload the image, then you can paste the image link here.

Thanks for the compliment!

By the way, the original ribcage chiller is no longer in my posession. I sold it to ArcaneXor and its now on its way to Florida with some stow-aways in the package. "Just a couple of live yeast samples", is what I told the lady at the post office.

I wish I had thought of the idea first because I would build'em and sell'em

Using warm Florida tap water (72 deg F), it took about 12 minutes to get 4.5 gallons of water to 105 degrees, after which it's almost like hitting a brick wall - 25 minutes to 90 degrees.

I bet that I'll be able to get down to pitching temperature within half an hour if I combine the chiller with an ice bath and intermittent whirlpooling, which would beat my previous method by about 20 minutes. So I am quite happy.

Hey Danny, coil that real long input hose in the sink next to the pot and have ice in that sink so you cool the input water before it hits the chiller. (I assume you have a 2 basin/side by side sink like I do)

Just made my ribcage chiller!



Got 45' of copper off craigslist for $25, just need to grab some hi-temp tubing and I'll be set. So these are supposed to chill faster than the single-coil chillers? Why is that?

Because you have more contact area vs the single coil. Think of it this way, if you have a single stack of coils in effect you have 1 verticlal column or a single cylinder of chilling mass, the copper. With this, you have basically 2 vertical cylinders, and more even distribution throughout the pot/kettle of cooling rails, or coils, because they are relatively evenly spaced. i.e. one on the outer wall of the pot, one nearer the center, another nearer the center and another at the opposite wall of the pot. Basically its all about copper to wort coverage.

Make sense?

Totally, I get the increased contact area... I'm just curious about the increasingly hot water running through the coils... by the time the water gets to the second coil, will it be cool enough to chill the wort? Will it be hot enough to heat up the cooler water from the first coil as it passes it? There's a lot I don't know about physics.

I am actually thinking of makeing one of these to be a pre-chiller; place in an ice bucket to bring the water temp down lower than 72 degrees here in my apartment.

Well, my initial test had the chiller bringing the wort from boiling to 160 in 3 minutes... I don't know that there is much in the way of worrying about how hot the water is passing through the coils after the first few minutes. THe water is heated up on its way through the first coil, and then as its racing up the second, there should be a small temperature differential in the wort. Either way, my initial test cooled from boiling to pitching in 9 minutes with only 20' of 3/8 tubing with the incoming water charge at 42*F.

Could there be a better design that goes a little faster? Sure, but when I can make 2 coils instead of one, in 15 minutes, Its not really worth it to make a better and more time consuming coil setup.

:shrug:

dutch101st said:

I am actually thinking of makeing one of these to be a pre-chiller; place in an ice bucket to bring the water temp down lower than 72 degrees here in my apartment.

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Instead of a pre-chiller, invest in a pump and pump ice water directly through the IC.

I'm bumping this thread because I'm wondering if anyone has tried this with a keggle. I have purchased all the materials to build a single column IC for a keggle (I just made) but after seeing this rib-cage IC I've put the breaks on.

If you use the 2 paint cans method I think rib-cage IC going to be too wide to fit in the keggle. This would imply smaller diameter columns. I'd like to know if others have already tried??

Thanks.