Commercial Water Fountain Chiller

An HVAC friend of mine is going to give me one of these: LINK



I'm not sure which model it is until I pick it up on Friday.

Can anyone recommend an in-line filter? I will definitely have an internal screen on the backside of the ball valve in the kettle, but I want another screen. I'm going to mount this on the side of my single tier.

Has anyone tried this or can offer any recomendations...pros/cons?

Thanks...

Here is a picture of the water chiller that I got for free this weekend.



Here are some pictures of the single tier stand that I am building:

What gallon cpacity is it?

I am just wondering what the efficiency of that unit will be in a temp change differential. If I were to wager a guess, the fountains I am used to dispense water at about 40*F and typical water temps here are in the 50's so that is a mere 10 degree difference.

I hope I am wrong but, I don't think you'll get the cooling efficiency you are after for boiling wort.

Might work great as a water bath chiller tho, in that it will have more time to work.

Like I said, I hop I am wrong.

Might suggest you run it a few times before you commit.

Residential hose flows, what 6 gallons per minute? Even at the high end of 32 gallons, will 5 minutes suffice?

Low end of 1.5 gallons is clearly not enough.

I'd use that in a fermentation chiller setup. You'll have much better results if you get an insulated box and run refrigeration tubing throughout that carries the water cooled by that chiller.

As others have said, unless you attach it to a reservoir and pre-chill a large volume it won't be able to keep up. The wort is going to overwhelm that tiny compressor really quickly.

Convert a big cheap cooler into a reservoir and use that, or use it for fermentation.

That or sell it... PC enthusiasts will gobble it up (That's why I had mine...)

I'm going to test it out this weekend. There is a min/max screw on the back. I'll crank it to max and do a test run by bringing 5 gallons of water to a boil, then recirculating it through the chiller back into the kettle until it reaches 70 degrees.

I'm doubtful that it will be able to chill the flow rate from the boil kettle ball valve stright through the chiller and into a carboy. The capacity looks to hold about a gallon. I'll probably have to recirculate it through the boil kettle for a while. I'm used to a CFW chiller getting the job done in a short amount of time.

I don't imagine that I would want to wait around for an hour or more for the whole kettle to chill down. Although, not messing with (or wasting) water would be a nice change.

It looks like a 5-6 gallon per hour chiller, coupled to a 10 gallon tank it would work for wort chilling. Here is a picture of the cooling system for the phase 2 system Picasa Web Albums - Kevin - Cooling system this uses 2 - 6 GPH chillers in tandem to cool about 10 gallons of coolant for CFC and other purposes. Probably would not be a good idea to inflict boiling water on the water cooler as it was built for water inlet temperatures under 100 deg F, normal minimum outlet temp is 40 deg F.

Could you give me some more details on how to use one of these for a fermentation chiller? I have a blichmann 1 bbl fermenter I am trying to set up with a glycol system.