Double Wort Chiller

So I have a question about a set up for wort chillers. I have one wort chiller right now and it does work quite well. I was talking to a local brewer briefly and he was mentioning how many brewers will use two wort chillers one in an ice bath and the other in the wort. I am just curious how you construct such a system? Does anyone have any advice, ideas, or personal experience. Thank you very much!

Hook your garden hose to the chiller in the ice bath. Then come from the outlet of that chiller to the inlet of the one in your pot with a short piece of hose. Basically your chilling your tap water before it gets to the brewpot.

I use something similar to this, I used to use an immersion chiller, but recently bought a plate chiller. Now I use the immersion chiller as a pre-chiller for the plate chiller. I place my immersion chiller into my cleaned out mash-tun (cooler) and fill with water. I then hook up my garden hose to the "in" hose on my immersion chiller, then hook up the "out" connection from my immersion chiller to the "in" port of my plate chiller. Typically I will recirculate wort through the plate chiller just using water out of the tap, and once I get the wort down to around 115-120, I'll dump ice into the cooler full of water containing my immersion chiller (pre-chiller). Using this method I can use bring my wort from a boil down to about 68 degrees in 15 minutes or so, in the dead heat of summer.

In my use of a pre-chiller, I wasn't impressed. I had to keep the pre-chiller moving in the ice water for it to chill the incoming water.

Now, I just recirculate ice water after using ground water to remove the bulk of the energy. I find this a much more efficient use of ice, and it works better for my setup.

If you are insistent on a double chiller though, I believe a post-chiller can be more efficient than a pre-chiller.

Whatever you decide to do, let us know your results!