Joining 2 immersion wort chillers?

I have a wort chiller like the below:



25 ft of 3/8" copper tubing

A buddy of mine has given me an identical one, nearly brand new. I really don't have need for 2, but I was thinking of combining them - make a few cuts and and either solder or compression fit the copper tubing together, effectively doubling the size of my chiller. Will the results (hopefully faster cooling) be worth effectively gutting a perfectly fine chiller? I'm doing full boils, but only 5 gal batches, not 10 gal boils (at least, not at this point).

You might wanna consider using the second chiller as a 'pre chiller' instead of combining the two. You could connect the two in series and put the first one in a bucket of ice water to pre-chill the water going into the chiller to improve your chilling efficiency...

Hmm, that's an idea, although I have also been considering utilizing a bilge pump and battery to pump ice cold water thru the chiller anyway and recycle the water...

I used a 1/4" copper coupler to solder two pieces of 3/8" tubing to make my 50 ' immersion chiller. I also used 1/4 " elbows to avoid kinks on the feed and return;



cheers
BeerCanuck

I made my chiller out of 50' of 1/2" copper tubing and it works pretty well. I do run into problems during warm weather months when my ground water from the hose is about 82° though. I scored a free 1250 gph sump pump from my dad last week and I plan to dry ice water recirculation on my next brew just to see how well it will work. It should work very well. Just to make sure it's going to work well, I'll probably run regular ground water through the chiller to get the wort down to about 150° or so and then switch over to the ice water recirculation to finish it off...

If I do solder I'm assuming the soldered joint is ok to be in contact with the wort...?

Don't use a lead base solder. Use something like 95/5 or higher if you can. Silver solder is what I used.

Salute!

WC87 said:

If I do solder I'm assuming the soldered joint is ok to be in contact with the wort...?

Click to expand...

There are all kinds of arguments about this. If you really wanted to nitpick the topic, there is no such thing as food safe solder. I used lead free solder and acid free flux to put mine together...

WC87 said:

Hmm, that's an idea, although I have also been considering utilizing a bilge pump and battery to pump ice cold water thru the chiller anyway and recycle the water...

Click to expand...

I did this for the first time this past weekend.

Used a cheap utility pump to recycle ice water thru the chiller.

Worked great.

Lowered the wort temp down to 64 degrees in less than 25 minutes.