Immersion chiller - can you draw from ice water?

CornyKegs 728
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Do a quick search for "submersible pump" and you'll find many threads on the subject. Quite a few folks do that here with great success.
 
i just made myself a pre-chillerthat worked pretty good today with the regular water temps at about 80. just an imersion chiller before the immersion chiller which I dstuck in a bucket of ice water
 
Awesome, thanks! I was just searching under the wrong key words... Off to Harbor Freight this week it is! Gotta love that store!

I thought about making a pre-chiller, but I think it's cheaper to buy a pump. The price of copper is really crazy nowadays! I just bought a bunch of fittings for my keggle (in 3/8") and I'm probably going spend $35 making a dip tube/bazooka screen!
 
I use the cheapest pond pump there is at home depot and some vynil tubing. It's less than $20 and works great. Usually takes 2 buckets of icewater to get down to temp.

-OCD
 
I would use tap water until you get the temp near to 100deg. It's easy to do that with tap temperatures. Plus your not wasting your ice water. Then I'd switch to the colder ice water when you reach the temps close to your tap water. if you re-circulate the first water through, you'll heat up your ice water super fast.
 
I have a coil of 50 foot garden hose I submerge in ice water in a cooler. It cut my cooling time by almost 40%
 
IXVolt said:
I would use tap water until you get the temp near to 100deg. It's easy to do that with tap temperatures. Plus your not wasting your ice water. Then I'd switch to the colder ice water when you reach the temps close to your tap water. if you re-circulate the first water through, you'll heat up your ice water super fast.
Click to expand...

I figured something like this might work best. The tap water is definitely cold enough to get the temp down into the low 80s... it's just that last little bit that could use a boost!

For anyone who uses a submergible pump, how do you connect it to your chiller? Mine has hose thread fittings... Thanks!
 
You could get a "Y" hose fitting, having two sources, one being your tap water hose, and the other your ice water. Closing one valve and open the other. There are a lot of ways to connect the copper to a hose. I use a dishwasher adapter with two hose clamps to connect my IC to a hose.
 
Many answers already but i use a hybrid method. I use a large storage bin that i put the kettle in to submerge the wort. But then i use a 200 GPH pump to also recirculate the ice water thru a 25' cooler as well. Needs 40 pounds of ice for a 5 gallon batch. But will cool it in under 10 mins.
 
I got a pump @ Petsmart for $15 and my LHBS had a hose barb that fit it so I get a big cooler, fill it with ice and tap water and put the pump in it and hook it up with siphon hoses to my IC. I can get my wort to pitching temps in 30 mins.
 

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