Immersion Chiller Techniques

I have the Midwest Stainless Immersion Chiller and it worked well with our enamel brew kettle, but not quite as well with our new stainless kettle.

It seemed to chill a little better when I would move the chiller around (stirring slowly or bobbing ever couple of minutes). Any other advice on making it work more efficiently?

PS it's the $60 chiller and we have a 5 gallon brew kettle.

Stir and move it up and down. Use cold water. If you can, get a pond-pump and connect it to the chiller, place in bucket of water and ice. Pump output water down sink and add cold water to bucket until temp get's down around 100*, then recirculate into bucket.

Or get a pre-chiller to put in a bucket of water, but the pond-pump is more efficient.

The more you can stir the wort, the faster it will cool. Some people worry about aeration while the wort is warm, but you can still move it around quite a bit without causing a bunch of foam. I guess the optimal thing would be to pump the wort around while the chiller ran, but I just use a big spoon and stir hard every minute to two to keep things moving. tre9er makes a good point too, you can only get so cold as your water will allow, so if your water is fairly warm you can take steps to cool that before using it.

Thanks guys.