Chilling wort

I currently have a 25' immersion chiller that is not sufficient for my needs. The tap water where I'm at is about 85*+ this time of year, which makes cooling my wort very difficult, therefore am looking at any options for improving my chilling ability. Someone has suggested a second immersion chiller placed in an ice bath feeding the main one in the wort. Are there any other recommendations? The goal is to be able to chill wort down to lager pitching temperatures as quickly as possible!

I have the same problem. What I do is let the the wort chiller do most of the work, and then when the kettle gets to about body temperature, I put the wort into my fermenters and put those fermenters into a rubbermaid tub full of water and frozen 2-liter bottles of water. Works pretty well, and costs nothing extra.

I also bought a fountain pump that I plan to put in a bucket of ice water and hook up to my wort chiller. Stole this idea from an old edition of BYO.

the pre-chiller is a good way to go. even with a counterflow, the best you are able to achieve is a wort temperature equal to the tap water temp. Still too high, and you cooling efficiency would really suck.

Another idea is the beginner's method of a simple ice bath. maybe combine that with your other method.

Another good method is to do a partial volume boil (I.E. don't add extra water to compensate for boiloff loss). After you've chilled the wort as low as you can get it, add top-up water from a sanitized container in the fridge. It will help you drop a few extra degrees.

I would chill the wort as low as you can with the tap water. It will take forever just to get down to 90F with your 85F tap water. I would chill with tap water only until you get below 100F then switch to running ice water through the chiller with either gravity flow or a pump. Chill as low as you can with the ice water then rack to the fermenter. Put the fermenter in your lagering fridge or freezer (I'm assuming you have one if you are making a lager) and chill overnight before aerating the wort and pitching the following morning. The risk of contamination/infection is somewhat higher doing it this way due to the delay in pitching, but it hasn't been a problem for me and I've been doing it this way with my lagers for a long time. I do not like having to buy a lot of ice for chilling purposes.

I'm in the process of doing some chilling tests now.
So far, what I have found;

Starting with 10 gallons of boiling water;
Pumping through 25' x 3/8" CFC using 79f tap water, I can achieve 80f in 9.5 minutes.

Pumping through 25' x 3/8" CFC using 79f tap water AND then through 25' x 1/2" coil submerged in 7lbs of ice & water, I can achieve 67f in 13.5 minutes.

Cool as much as you can within reason before you add the ice.

I'm still working on this. I am OK with the times, but I am concerned about the 3/8" CFC getting clogged (it has happened before when I was gravity feeding it). Also I want to whirlpool in the BK and would like to use that time to start the cooling process so I'm gonna try a coil in line with my return to the BK.

I posted this in another wort chilling thread and would love to get some comments/suggestions.

I've been running an idea through my head over the past few weeks. Currently, I put a 1/4" x 25' copper IC in my 7g kettle (while simultaneously giving a salted ice bath), which cooled down my wort to pitchable temps in 20 minutes (in the Florida heat - as recent as August 10).

However, I just recently purchased a 15.5g Keggle and I'm itching to use it, but I'm fairly certain my old IC won't get the job done - even with an ice bath - in less than 20 minutes. I'm also considering that my hose water doesn't exactly get "cold" (temp is something close to 70ish, by my estimation).

I've investigaged a couple other IC options as I'm not really interested in the CFC route at the moment. One of them is to purchase and/or build a 50'x1/2"(or 3/8") IC and attach it to my old 25'x1/4" IC (which will be submerged in a salty ice bath) - which is subsequently hooked to my garden hose. So essentially, it'd look like this:

Garden hose -->25'x1/4" IC (in a salty ice bath) -->50'x1/2"(or 3/8") IC submerged in wort.

This would work similar to using a pump submerged in a salty icebath pumping cold water through the IC, with the benefit being that I wouldn't have to refill the ice bath from time to time.

My thought is that I would get extremely chilled hose water running through the 50' IC. Even without putting the keggle in an ice bath, I'd assume that I'd get pitchable temps within 15 minutes or so.

Thoughts? I'm wondering if that's a better option than hooking up a $15 pump from Harbor Freight. Don't forget that I need to get a 50' IC anyways due to the larger kettle. I'm just thinking outside the box.