New Wort Chiller

Made my new chiller on Friday before starting batch #2 on Saturday. I split the 50' of copper tubing in two and made a prechiller first. This fits inside a small cooler. I was able to bend the tubing by hand by feeding it slowly and being careful.



The actual chiller I did as two concentric rings. Most designs look like a cylindrical wall which I think is impractical for two reasons. One is it focuses all the cooling in a smaller area, but mostly I think it inhibits the flow of wort between the coils.



Here's the prechiller in action. I should have used more ice but it worked very well.



Lastly, here's the chiller in action. There was condensation forming on the line into the wort due to the prechill. The water coming out was very hot to begin with. I noticed that, as the outlet water cooled, stirring the wort heated the outlet up again. Next time I'll try stirring fairly continuously. Even so I got from boiling down to 73F in 25 minutes.



The whole thing fits nicely into a large Rubbermaid container to stop it getting knocked about.

One word of advice. I did a last minute leak test before use on Saturday which left water in the coils. This did two things. First it cooled the boil when I added the cooler to the wort and took a minute or so to recover. Secondly it started to boil the water in the chiller, sending hot vapor through the outlet hose and almost scalded me.

I have a pre-chiller too and have found it helps me a lot to have someone stir the ice water around the pre-chiller as well. Of course, here our tap water is warm and a chiller with no pre-chiller will only get the Wort down to low 80s.

I'm still thinking of doing the pond pump idea in a bottom of a bucket of ice water. Seems like it might work better than a pre-chiller. Cheaper than a prechiller as well.