How long should an immersion chiller take to cool down 5 gallons of wort?

I bought a 25' immersion chiller to use on my first batch of AG. The brewday went perfectly...until it was time to cool the wort down. Even with the immersion wort chiller going full blast, the wort was still 80+ degrees after 45 minutes. What gives? I heard that most immersion chillers would cool boiling wort to 80 degrees in as little as 15 minutes. Am I doing something wrong? I just could not seem to get the wort below 80 degrees for the LONGEST time. It eventually took juat a shade under an hour to get the wort cooled to pitching temps. Does anyone have any suggestions on why this may have taken so long?

Thanks for the help.


Edit: BTW, the brand of chiller I got was L.D. Carlson.

Sounds about right. Check the temperature of the water coming from your spigot to the immersion chiller, I bet it is in the mid to high 70's.

Also the diameter of the tubing plays somewhat into the cooling time.

Did you stir the wort while you were chilling?

Did you run the water full blast or at a trickle?

The length of time is directly related to the temperature of your ground water, too. My ground water is always cold, summer or winter, in my climate; but yours may be 70+ degrees this time of year. That means it will take longer to chill.

Some people use pond pumps and recirculate ice water, to avoid that. Some have "prechillers", which is an immersion chiller in a cooler with ice that the water flows through to get colder before it gets to your wort chiller.

Gently stirring the wort helps cool it faster. I get to pitching temps in 20-30 minutes in my case.

Full blast but I did not stir the wort. I checked the water coming out of my spigot and it was in the 75-78 degree range so that would explain the reason why the wort refused to budge below the 79-78 degree range, but it doesn't explain the reason why it took me approx. 45 minutes to get the wort to 80 degrees when other people are talking about getting from boiling to 80 in 15 minutes. Would stirring the wort make that big of a difference? Also, I was covering the pot during the chill down, could this have been a factor. This was my first time dealing with a chiller and I am just trying to figure out if I was utilizing it correctly.

Hot water rises, so if you chiller is sitting on the bottom, you are colling some of the cooler wort that you have. Mixing it up will help.

Check your thermometer as well. My old brewing thermometer ran about 6-7 degrees hotter than actual temperature! It read 77 and I'd be down to 70. Also I move the chiller up and down which speeds up cooling.

Chilling wort is more complicated than it may appear on first glance. Some of the big factors have been covered in this thread already. Temperature differential between your wort and the chilling water in the chiller is huge. Generally: the more the faster, but it's not that simple. Agitation (stirring) is important, and a moment's reflection shows why. The chiller is constantly moving the temperature of the wort just on the other side of the chiller wall down, thus decreasing the differential. So- stirring a lot is really helpful, because it's constantly mixing and thus raising the temperature of that wort right next to the chiller wall, thus increasing the efficiency of the process.

Of course, the material of the chiller is important. A copper chiller has better conductivity than one made of stainless steel.

There are also things that go on INSIDE the chiller, as I learned when I went to change out the connectors on my Midwest copper chiller (just the entry level 25' 3/8" tubing model. I got tired of the hose clamps that held on the vinyl hoses leaking, so I changed them out to compression / hose fittings. While doing this, I noticed that there is a yellow plastic tape in the tubing that runs the entire length of the chiller. I e-mailed Midwest about this, and they said the plastic tape is put in the tubing on purpose, to increase the efficiency of the chiller. While it does retard water flow to some extent, it mixes the water in the tubing, thus apparently accomplishing the same thing inside the tubing that stirring does outside. The Midwest guy said that without the tape, it would take 15% longer to cool the wort. Interesting.
My cooler will take a full 5 gal. boil to 70F in 21-22 minutes, but we have a well, and the water is pretty much 55F year-round.

If your water is as warm as you say, perhaps you'd benefit from going to the pond pump / ice bath system mentioned earlier. I have a submersible pump, and have considered doing a recirculation into a large cistern on the side of the house, that usually is half full with probably 1,000 gallons of ground temp water in there. Same principle.

Stirring makes a major difference. Without stirring, the cooling is dependent on the formation of convective currents in the wort. These are driven by the differences in density between hot and cooled wort, which aren't much.

Thanks guys. Stirring makes sense. Regardless of my chiller issues, I feel that my first AG went very, very well and I am looking forward to my next brewday.

I grab my chiller by the input & output and vigorously lift it up and down, I figure that this will also get oxygen into my wort before I pitch the yeast.

In Buffalo is takes about 15-20 minutes for me to get to 80° with my 50' chiller.

Definately move the wort around. 45 minutes by just setting the chiller in there and leaving it sounds about right. If you sit there and gently swirl the chiller around in the wort, you should be looking at around 15-20 minutes with your water temperature. It's essentially a big heat exchanger, so the key is getting new wort to constantly touch the coils so that exchange can happen. A very easy way to see how effectively you're exchanging heat is to put your chiller in the hot wort and turn on the water. Feel the output pipe. Initially (the first few seconds) it will be very hot because of all the heat exchange that took place. If you don't move it, after around 15-20 seconds, you'll notice that the output pipe temperature starts to cool. Now grab it and swirl it around. It will immediately get hot again as the coils see new, hot wort. This is why Jamil's whirlpool immersion chiller works so much faster.

Down here in AZ during the summer it takes about 5 months.

Stirring and temp differential of the wort and water are the main factors in chilling the wort. Also I have found if I throttle back the water and not run at "full blast" It cools faster just like a car with no thermostat is prone to overheat because the coolant doesn't have enough contact time to take on the heat and release the heat in the radiator as its moving way to fast . If I run at full the water outlet temp actually goes down by 4-5° so it less efficient. And I use less water .

springer said:

Stirring and temp differential of the wort and water are the main factors in chilling the wort. Also I have found if I throttle back the water and not run at "full blast" It cools faster just like a car with no thermostat is prone to overheat because the coolant doesn't have enough contact time to take on the heat and release the heat in the radiator as its moving way to fast . If I run at full the water outlet temp actually goes down by 4-5° so it less efficient. And I use less water .

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+1. I noticed mine works better if it is not so fast too. And less water.

I have found that by stirring the hot wort the opposite direction of the water flow through the chiller, it cools down much faster. This also serves the dual purpose of adding some aeration.

I also don't turn the water on full blast, but at a nice steady rate. I typically cool 5 gallons down to pitchable temperatures in about 15 minutes.

david_42 said:

Stirring makes a major difference. Without stirring, the cooling is dependent on the formation of convective currents in the wort. These are driven by the differences in density between hot and cooled wort, which aren't much.

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exactly! This is how I get it done a lot faster and also part of my current aeration until I get an O2 setup.

Another thing is once you get it down to say 100, then use a little submersible pump to circulate ice water through the chiller.

I'm located in Michigan (lower peninsula), and it was damn hot the past two weeks (well, for me at least. 90+). I built my chiller with a single 35' 3/8"OD coil as my primary, with a vinyl hose connected to another coil (about 15') sitting in a big galvanized bucket of cold water with tons of ice packs (reused 1/2 gallon plastic apple juice bottles from brewing Graff!). I opened the bottles and let the water run in and out. That pre-chiller dropped the temp of my well water from 64 to 50 before it hit the hot wort!

I brought the wort down to 130 in under five minutes in a Holy Sh*t moment, but the drop from 130 to 90 took almost 10 minutes. By then the ice had started to melt nicely in the bucket, and I just sat there and dumped ice water in and out of the bottles, and dropped the wort from 90 to 60 in about 10 minutes (oops, wasn't expecting it to go below 70 in 90 degree high-humidity air)!

The pre-chiller doesn't have to be pretty, but it definitely helps, and it's cheap. +1 for low pressure from the tap, too.

I bought the cheapest chiller I could find, from brewstabrown. I thought I was getting 50' of 3/8" copper but it's probably more like a 1/4". Very disappointed.
However, If I fill a tub with about 4" of water from my well, and add 6 frozen 16oz of water bottles around the edges of the pot, I can get down to 80 degrees on a 90 degree day in 15 min.. Like I said I was disappointed at first, but at his price he would be losing money if he was selling 50' of 3/8". If I had to do it over again my first choice would be a boiling pot with a spigot and and a counterflow chiller, my second choice would be 50' 0f 3/8" immersion homemade.
Overall I am satisfied with the chilling i'm getting with very little ingenuity.
kman

St. Jon's Wort said:

Full blast but I did not stir the wort. I checked the water coming out of my spigot and it was in the 75-78 degree range so that would explain the reason why the wort refused to budge below the 79-78 degree range, but it doesn't explain the reason why it took me approx. 45 minutes to get the wort to 80 degrees when other people are talking about getting from boiling to 80 in 15 minutes. Would stirring the wort make that big of a difference? Also, I was covering the pot during the chill down, could this have been a factor. This was my first time dealing with a chiller and I am just trying to figure out if I was utilizing it correctly.

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Sure it does explain it. The rate at which you can take heat out is directly related to the differential between coolant temp and current temp. IE, If the wort is at 100, and your Coolant is at 80, and mine is at 60, I'm pulling out twice as much heat.

If the wort is at 90, I'm pulling out 3 times as much heat.

Synovia said:

...If the wort is at 100, and your Coolant is at 80, and mine is at 60, I'm pulling out twice as much heat.

If the wort is at 90, I'm pulling out 3 times as much heat.

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Math rocks... :rockin:

Like mentioned before. Get a longer plastic hose and submerge it in a cooler of ice. With enough hose you should be able to get your intake water down to around 40F pretty easy.

oldschool said:

Like mentioned before. Get a longer plastic hose and submerge it in a cooler of ice. With enough hose you should be able to get your intake water down to around 40F pretty easy.

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Putting the hose in ice is an excellent idea.