Wort Chiller Enough?

I made myself an immersion wort chiller with 25' of 1/2" copper tubing. Now, i am wondering to myself if i should have made it much larger- Palmer's 'How to Brew' recommends a chiller using at least 30' of tubing.

What I considered was getting a 50' coil of tubing and pirating the current chiller for making a manifold for my MLT, among other projects.

Thoughts?

It really depends on the temp of you water. The first time I hooked my 25 footer up to a sink and it still took a fair amount of time to get down below 80. (It rockets down to 100, but those last 25 degrees are killer). Then last night I hooked it up to a hose run from a mountain well and it took it from boiling to 65 in 10 minutes.

I would say get a 25 footer. An extra 5 feet won't do much, and 50 feet is alot more expensive. Later on if you upgrade to 50 feet, you can always use the 25 footer to dump in a pre wort ice bath.

Are you looking to do 5 or 10 gallon batches?

25' of 3/8" tubing is very common for 5 gallon batches and works fine. 50 feet of 1/2" seems to be pretty suitable for 10 gallon batches. I don't think I've seen many people mix the two and do a 25' chiller with 1/2" tubing... No reason it won't work, but you'll probably need to throttle it significantly if you care about water usage, as it'll have 33% more surface area than an identical chiller with 3/8" tubing but more than twice the internal cross-sectional area, giving much higher water flow rate.

Has anyone ever tried prechilling the water going in? Maybe coiling a garden hose in a cooler of ice before it enters the immersion chiller...

wfd146 said:

Has anyone ever tried prechilling the water going in? Maybe coiling a garden hose in a cooler of ice before it enters the immersion chiller...

Click to expand...

That will work to some extent, but garden hoses aren't made of the most heat conductive material.

I use a pond pump submerged in ice water to get down the last 30 or so degrees, they work great and require no modification. They can be used with any size IC.

wfd146 said:

Has anyone ever tried prechilling the water going in? Maybe coiling a garden hose in a cooler of ice before it enters the immersion chiller...

Click to expand...

You bet. When the tap water gets above 70 degrees an immersion cooler struggles. I took a friends immersion cooler (25' of 3/8) and put it in a 5 gal plastic pail. I connected the water inlet from the sink to this cooler and ran a hose from it's output to my normal chiller.

I use I just run tap water through the two chillers until I'm below a 100 degrees then I add ice and water to the 5 gal pail. The ice water chills the incoming water to the wort chiller and the next 30 degrees goes quickly. Takes about two bags of ice to do the deed.