using a wort chiller to heat water????

I am brewing on the kitcken stove, which takes a while to heat up large volumes of water. I wonder if i could put the water on the stove to heat but also throw my wort chiller in the pot and run the hottest tap water i can muster through it at the same time in order to speed the process up? Anyone tried this? Any thoughts?

Eventually the real answer is to get a propane burner and move outside.

IME the best way to supplement heating large volumes on the stove is with a heatstick.

Hot tap water just isn't really hot enough to heat through a coil IMO.

I think you would be wasting money on hot water. When I used the kitchen stove I would use a pot big enough to span 2 burners and that worked pretty well. However one tiny boil over and the work involved cleaning it sent me outside with propane burner.

You'd be better off splitting the required water between 4 pots, even if they're smaller then combine in the larger pot as they come up to temp. That would get all 4 burners in on the action which are typically 10-12kbtu each.

Just start off with water straight out of the hot water tap. It should be around 120F.

One thing I've done that has really help to reduce the amount of time it take to bring a pot to boil is to place the pot on two burners.

I bought an 8 gallon pot so I could do 6 gallon boils. At first I was depressed that I couldn't get it to sit on the large burner by itself. But when I spanned it over the large and small burners, I cut the amount of time it took to get to a boil down dramatically. Now I can do 6 gallon boils and bring the water up to a boil in about half the time it used to take me to do a 3.5 gallon boil with the smaller pot on only one burner.

+1 on the heatstick. Very easy to construct and to date I have had not issues electrically with it (3 brews).

My 8 gal pot doesn't quite straddle the large and small burners completely, so I don't use that technique lest I drop something on the exposed part or accidentally lean on it with my shirt

Yaeh this won't work. Once your pot of water hits tap water temperature, your wort 'heater' will actually be fighting the stove since the tap water is going to stay 120F (or so) which will cool the pot if its 130F.

Gremlyn1 said:

+1 on the heatstick. Very easy to construct and to date I have had not issues electrically with it (3 brews).

My 8 gal pot doesn't quite straddle the large and small burners completely, so I don't use that technique lest I drop something on the exposed part or accidentally lean on it with my shirt

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Yeah, mine doesn't either. And that is an important safety tip. But I brew shirtless anyway.

Beernik said:

Just start off with water straight out of the hot water tap. It should be around 120F.

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I wouldn't recommend using hot water to do any cooking or brewing, unless you're pretty sure the inside of your hot water heater is clean. When I've looked in mine, there's often all kinds of crud and gunk in there.

I'd go with the 1-pot-on-2-burner solution, or start heating up water on multiple burners...

I've always brewed with hot tap water. Out of three different houses I've lived in I've never detected any flavor problems attributed to hot tap water. Granted, I let the water run for a bit because I'm in an old house and sometimes the water is funky at first.

I have city water and sewer. The tap water smells strongly of chlorine, so i've never used it before to brew. We have a natural spring in nearby Berkeley Springs, WV which is free. I load up on it evertime im in the area. Last time I took 17 gallons. I brewed my first AG yesterday and it would have been a pain in the a$$ to hook up the wort chiller just to help the tap water reach a higher temp faster. It seemed like a good idea when it came to me but in hind site, not really.

EvilTOJ said:

I've always brewed with hot tap water. Out of three different houses I've lived in I've never detected any flavor problems attributed to hot tap water. Granted, I let the water run for a bit because I'm in an old house and sometimes the water is funky at first.

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I would not recommend using your hot tap water specially in an older home . My house was built in the 50's I'm sure the solder is the 50/50 mix. I replaced all the lines except the main line coming in it copper and is soldered. Lead will leach into hot water in small amounts but will build up in the body. I filter the drinking water. I don't care about the minerals in the water its the lead