Submersible pumps for glycol/water immersion chiller

I am looking for a submersible pump that will be adequate to push a 1:3 mixture of glycol/water from a 5-gallon bucket inside my keezer into the immersion chiller that will be chilling my Brewhemoth. I have found plenty of options, but where I get lost is on what kind of flow rate I need. There's probably some kind of cool formula to figure it out but I don't know what it is, nor what the viscosity of this solution is like.

I was checking out Wayne submersibles on Northern Tool and they are my front runner right now. But the thing I don't want to do is buy too much pump and it would be nice if it was somewhat energy efficient.

Any recommendations? TIA.

bump! I have a bunch of danner mag-drive sumps, mostly models 2, 3, 5, and 7. Did you give that pump a go?

I ended up buying a Superior 1/3rd HP submersible pump. I haven't used it yet - still building the keezer

How is this going to work? If you have your freezer set up as a keezer, then the glycol solution would only be 34-40 degrees. Unless you are using a large reservoir, then it will be hard to use this setup to chill. Another thing to consider is the heat transfer of the system. When you use this thing, you are going to be moving the heat energy from your hot wort into your keezer. It may heat up the inside of the keezer quite a bit, and warm up all the beer you have sleeping in there. Just something to keep in mind. Cool idea, I'd like to see where it goes.

Ya to sum it up - it's not for exactly the reasons you mentioned! For now I'm going to just push water from a 10 gallon reservoir into the fermenter and get what I can get. Long term I need to separate the chilling so I'll have some kind of dedicated chiller.

I made this post with a keen sense of misunderstanding ;-)

I didn't mean to burst your bubble on this one. I still think it's a good idea, just not in conjunction with the keezer. Maybe if you had a dedicated freezer, you could get the glycol into the 0 degree range and it would be much more effective. Even at that temperature, you would need about twice the volume of your boil in glycol solution to chill it down to pitching temps (~70F).

No not at all - it was already bursted long ago! I will definitely have something dedicated. I like the idea of using the coils out of a dehumidifier to chill a bath of glycol solution. That is high on the list of possibilities right now.

I am not too concerned about using glycol for pitching temps. I have a 50-plate chiller and between city water and some ice water I should be able to get it most of the way down. I'm mostly interested in glycol chilling for lagering.

jcaudill said:

I am not too concerned about using glycol for pitching temps. I have a 50-plate chiller and between city water and some ice water I should be able to get it most of the way down. I'm mostly interested in glycol chilling for lagering.

Click to expand...

That's what I figured you wanted it for when you said it was for the BH and not a kettle. I think it would work just fine for that. May not crash it quick but if the BH is insulated it will get there.

i would suggest an air conditioner over a dehumidifier. air conditioners are designed to remove a good quantity of heat in a reasonable amount of time, while dehumidfiers really arent.

im working on a 'universal' chiller project at the moment that involves a scrap A/C unit and a glycol bath. i say universal because i plan on using the chilled glycol to regulate temps in a kegerator, a fermentation chamber, and whatever else i can think of to pump it thru. it will be kind of modular in that it wont be integrated specifically into whatever it cools. its actually small enough to be somewhat portable if i wanted to bring it to a party and use it instead of ice.

im usign a 6500BTU A/C and it cools about 10 gallons of liquid to mid 30's F in maybe 30-60 minutes. it would take atleast a whole day to do that with a dehumidifier- that is if it could keep up with the amount of ambient heat being absorbed during that time.


for pumps im probably looking at either submersible pond/fishtank pumps (trying to stay 120v for simplicity), or else pc water cooling pumps like the Laing D5 or MCP355 if nothing else (i have used those two specifically with glycol chillers before, they will work down to about -40F if you are careful, the plastic becomes brittle so you cant overtighten clamps or screws, or put lots of stress on the barbs).

another option is to use a diaphragm pump rather than a submersible pump.

They are self priming, so you can have them out side of the glycol bath.

jcaudill said:

I am looking for a submersible pump that will be adequate to push a 1:3 mixture of glycol/water from a 5-gallon bucket inside my keezer into the immersion chiller

Any recommendations? TIA.

Click to expand...

I used a LG submersible pump with my 30 gallon chiller and the pump died after two years running 24/7.
Currently I am using a Grainger magnetic drive pump for over four years with great results chilling my fermenters and cooling the wort chiller.
I use two counterflow chillers, one is cooled with city water and the second one with 70%/30% water/glycol mixture.
I have no problems getting my fermenters down to below 40° F and during wort chilling (10 g) the reservoir temp will increase 8-10° F.


Evaporator under construction, before cleaning




Cheers,
ClaudiusB