wort chiller question

Brewed my first batch today, all extract IPA with steeping grain and 3 hop additions. Things went well, read no boilover, until time to chill. Ambiant air temp was 83, water from faucet was 72, wort was boiling. Initial cooling was quick to about 100 degrees, the last 22 degrees down to 78 was forever, total time of 50 minutes, too slow. I am thinking of building a "pre-chiller" out of copper tubing to immerse in an icewater bath in the sink before water gets to chiller in brewpot. I'm thinking if I can get initial water down to the upper 30's to low 40's the heat exchange will occur within 15 minutes. Anybody tries this? Thanks.

i've sen the "pre-chiller" but can't remember where.

normally i do not have a problem bringing the temps down in around 15 minutes with a standard wort chiller. i have also found that stiring the wort every five or so minutes speeds up the process.

After upgrading my brew pot, I was in need of a wort chiller of different dimensions. I now use my old wort chiller as a pre-chiller to submerge in an ice bath. I leave it out of the ice bath until my wort is down to about 120 degrees then I drop it in the ice. One bag of ice will do the trick for me. I am bringing a full five gallon volume down to 75 from boiling in under 30 mins. You really need to play with the flow volume to maximize the efficiency of this process. I really slow the flow down once I submerge my pre-chiller so that the water going into the brew pot cooler is very cool. My conditions are about 95f with 70f tap water. If you are doing less than 5gal boils, this would be much quicker for you. The other alternative would be a counterflow chiller. I have no experience with these but I hear they work great.

The trick is to keep some sort of circulation going while chilling. I noticed as I would grab the outflow end of my submersible wort chiller it would be cool. As I moved it up and down it would get hot enough to where I could no longer hold on to it. So, from then on I would occasionally agigitate my wort chiller up and down to create a thermal flow and it works great. It takes me about 20 Min to cool boiling wort to 75DegF.

indeed sudster that's why i stir...i was tricked once had the cooking thermometer in the wort - and the imersion chiller chillin away...themometer said 75° but when i stuck the tip of my finger in the wort it was hot and i knew something was up - the wort had stratified with the coolest on the bottom where my chiller is and the hottest on top.

oh and before i get a bunch of sanatizing police decending on my finger yes it was sanatized...as much as the end of my finger could be affter having them in bleach solution all day using it as a hand washing as well.