plate chillers

How do they work. I currently using a coil type chilled and it uses a lot of water. I don't have a pump , do I need one for a plate chiller
?

From what I know that you don't "need" a pump for a plate chiller, because it "can" work with gravity, it's just not very good.

You can use a pump with your coil chiller. Creating a closed system. Biermuncher, and EdWort both do or have done it in the past with a pond pump. You can even get crazier and do a pre-chiller into your chiller. It's what I do.

How does your prechiller work?

i have an immersion chiller... with that i use a cheap aquarium pump to push ice cold water through it. This sits in the wort to chill it. the cold water never comes in contact with the beer and it cools it down.

I recently went to a plate chiller. The first time I did not hook up the counterflow properly and didn't get very desirable results. The next time I hooked it up right and also used a pre-chiller (my immersion chiller in an ice water batch) on the water line. Outside temp was 90, exiting water was only 73 and my wort only got down to 77 despite adding the "chilled wort" back into the boil kettle in 3 gal batches since it was only getting to the high 80s... Next time my ice bath is going to be in a cooler, not a bucket and I'm going to run the wort right back into the boil kettle for a while.

So, I'm still not real happy...I got a 20 plate job...I'm thinking I should have gone much bigger. But still, I think this will work better than my immersion with ground water because I don't think I would ever get wort cooled with it in 100 degree temps outside..... It's why I went this way...couldn't brew decently in the summer..May thru Sep

My remaining question is the position of the chiller...vertical, horizontal? If horizontal, on side or flat, which side high and which side low> Anybody?

check this out.. the vendor explains it exactly.,.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f41/40-plate-chiller-89-kegcowboy-com-200974/