Homemade Counterflow chiller--Sanitation Question

Just bought and almost fully assembled a homemade counterflow chiller. Looks pretty good, 20ft of 3/8" copper, compression fittings were sottered on each end where the three-way tee meets the copper. My question is about sanitizing one of these bad boys. It sounds like the best/easiest way is to boil some water and then siphon the boiled water, while it is scalding hot, through the coils and then stop the flow before all the water is out of the pot. This way, the siphon will be ready to start when I stick the inlet tube into the hot wort.

Anybody have any suggestions/ideas for sanitizing these or is this a pretty good route. Thanks!

I flushed mine with hot water and then ran sanitizer throught it and capped it off with the sanitizer still in it. then I flush it and santize before and after each use.

Cheers

If you ran sanitizer though it and capped it, I don't think you need to sanitize again. That said, I'm equally as paranoid. I run boiling water through mine just prior to heating my mash water just to be sure.

My CFC is 50' (overkill I know...but I plan on splitting it in half later for a buddy) so I've always had an issue with running boiling water through it. The water that is left in the hose absorbs so much heat that it's not near hot enough when it comes out the other end. So I just clean it with BLC and run some iodine through it after every use.

I had a pretty easy method.

The first thing I cleaned out was my MLT. I rinsed it well, then filled it with water and OxyClean. While I was then cleaning my keggle, I ran the OxyClean solution from the MLT through the chiller. After rinsing out the keggle, crank the burner back on and heat up the water and add some OxyClean to it. When it's warm, run it through the CFC. For added fun, run the OxyClean from your CFC into another vessle that needs cleaning.

I ran hot vinigar thru it a few times to clean the inside of the tubing.
I run hot water from the tap (a fitting screwed on to the faucet with a hose) after to clean it. Then I tilt and move the chiller around to drain all the water out.
I'll run sanitizer thru it and cap it to store it.
I'll run some more thru during the boil, then run hot wort thru it before I turn the water on.

Craig5_12 said:

My CFC is 50' (overkill I know...but I plan on splitting it in half later for a buddy) so I've always had an issue with running boiling water through it. The water that is left in the hose absorbs so much heat that it's not near hot enough when it comes out the other end. So I just clean it with BLC and run some iodine through it after every use.

Click to expand...

Aha, I blow air through the cold water side with my compressor so that's probably why my boiling water comes out hot. It takes about a gallon before it heats the copper up, but then the rest of the water continues to come out close to 200F.