Cheaper chiller idea

With the price of 3/8 copper coil being near $60, i decided to try and come up with another chiller design rather than a counter flow type.
My plan is to run 60' of straight copper pipe inside a 4" diameter pice of black pipe, and then run my wort though the copper copper while running cold water through the pvc at the same time. Since i already have the black pvc and the 4" caps all i would need to buy is the copper and some fittings. My well water tmp is around a constant 50 degrees through out the year.
Has anyone built anything like this, pictures would be great.
Would it work well, considering my water temp.

there's a design similar to that in the brewware book. i don't have a pic to show you but it apparently works fairly well. go for it!

Will you be making a 60' 4" pipe or run the copper back and forth using ubend fittings?

Won't you waste quite a lot of water?

That's called a tube and shell exchanger. Straight copper tubing with all the appropriate elbows to make the run go back and forth will be more expensive than the same length of anealed tubing and it will be harder to build. I can't see the benefit.

Since you have 4" pipe you could put a coil in it, maybe put a sealed 3" pipe down the center to fill some of the volume, which you could also use to coil the tubing around.

So if copper is too expensive where are you getting the copper you plan to use with the PVC pipe?

I would suck it up and get a coil ASAP. The price of copper is likely to increase into the future at high rate, especially since the demand for ammunition is at an all time high which is a huge demand for copper.

I was intending on making a 50' counter flow chiller, cant seem to get the cost bellow $90. So I guess I will go with that way. Or is a 50' counter flow chiller excessive for 10 gallon batches?

How exactly can one make a counterflow chiller? I was under the impression that a counterflow had a smaller diameter copper tubing inside a larger diameter tube, you pump wort through the small tube one way and water through the outer tube in the opposite direction. Seems difficult to build yourself.

Jayhem said:

How exactly can one make a counterflow chiller? I was under the impression that a counterflow had a smaller diameter copper tubing inside a larger diameter tube, you pump wort through the small tube one way and water through the outer tube in the opposite direction. Seems difficult to build yourself.

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Not hard at all, I recently made one by re-purposing an immersion chiller I had made some years back and used some standard garden hose. I can assure you that the $50 goodyear rubber hoses are not needed, just something that is at least 'medium duty.'

This is the thread for Bobby's solder one https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/counterflow-chiller-tutorial-51793/

I have no soldering ability whatsoever, and didn't want to buy the stuff needed to learn b/c I was keeping costs down. All in all, I think it cost me ~$25 in parts (I had 25' of copper and a garden hose already)

I just used compression fitting instead of solder, and it hasn't leaked at all- it also gets my wort down from near boiling to under 70* in one gravity-fed pass.

The counterflow chiller is easy to build, should only take and hour or so. Its also not too expensive, mine costed me around 60$ and I can get 5 gallons to 65 in ten minutes.

Would a 25' CFC be enough for 10gal batches? I would like to get the cooling time down to 30 min or less.

Just like with an immersion chiller, it will depend on the temp of your tap water. At 30min, you would be running it slow enough that 25' MAY get you there, but longer would be better.

Start scouring scrap yards for copper coil. I found 20' of 1/2" pipe for about $20. Works great.

Here's my tube and shell idk if it helps or just confuses. It's all stainless

Anyone know were to get silicone u channel by the foot?