Recirc. Immersion Chiller

[sddanc]

Hey Guys,

New to posting here. Been lurking for a few weeks now. Last night I put together a quick and cheap recirculating IC, but have a question about the cooling capacity. I piggybacked off a bilge pump that I have for a portable "Big Kahuna" surfing shower. The vinyl line that fed from the pump just so happened to have a large enough ID for the vinyl tubing I had to fit snug inside (with extra insurance from a hose clamp). The pump works off of DC power and seems to pull with enough power to push water up and through a 20ft coil and back into the 6.6gal receptacle. I was able to get my hot water (i was testing the system) from boiling to 160F in about 6 minutes. However, it took a whole lot of ice to keep the returning water in the receptacle to stay around 80F. At the end of the day, my kettle water fell to around 90F in about 20-25 minutes. I saw the system worked and cut the day there.


My question is such,

At what volume of water, would sustain a great enough cooling capacity to avoid constantly adding ice to the circulation? I recognize my 6.6gal receptacle may not be overly efficient, but it was cheap and simple to assemble. If it comes to it, I am in the position to buy a 25 dollar bilge pump and throw it into a large party keg bath bucket thing. Might this be an arbitrary inquiry, given the nature of the pump's strength and ambient temperature, I only seek a ballpark guesstimation.


Cheers all!

heres the only picture I snapped

and a link to the hardware
http://bigkahunashowers.com/

 

[horseinmay]

A good rule of thumb is that you will need a pound of ice for every pound of water that you need to bring from boiling down to pitching temperature.

 

[cyberbackpacker]

My best practice is to use tap water until the wort reaches the temp of the tap water, and then add ice into the equation-- much more efficient this way.

 

[TyTanium]

+1 for tap water at first. Otherwise you're just melting ice. Collect the tap runoff and you have plenty of warm water for cleaning. I switch to recirc pump & ice somewhere between 110 and 130.

And don't forget to move your chiller around in the wort - cuts your cooling time in half.

See Boerderij_Kabouter's post for a spreadsheet to calculate how much ice:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f13/cl...ater-recirculation-how-much-do-i-need-173089/

 

[sddanc]

This is excellent, thanks guys. I will take this all into account

 

[Boerderij_Kabouter]

I do totally closed circuit cooling and have developed a spread sheet for determining how much ice I need to use to achieve my desired finishing temp. We used to be able to upload spreadsheets...

As an example, if you have a typical 5g batch of 1.050 wort at 210º, and you use 28# of ice at 0º and 10 qt of water surrounding the ice at 50º, and then you circulate the ice water through a chiller, your ice will be melted and hte wort will be at 96º, after the water and wort have equalized the wort will be at 72º.

In my experience this chart gets you very close. So with 30# of ice, you should be good to go.

 

[Boerderij_Kabouter]

Huh. I forgot I wrote about that here. Thanks, TyTanium.

 

[MrZ2U]

I fill a 48 qt cooler with 40lbs of ice at one of those bulk ice kiosk places. Just before I shut off the heat I fill it with water from the tap. I pump that icewater through my IC and let the water drain away while filling the cooler with more tap water till the flow from the IC is cool to the touch…then I let it recycle in the cooler. I measured it once to see how much water flowed from the IC before the temp dropped to recirculation temps and surprisingly it was only about 6 gallons. I am going to eventually build a new IC with larger tubing so at that time it will interesting to see the difference.


I generally have ice left at the end of the chilling and I go from boil to 75 degrees, even in the dead of an Austin Texas summer in about 15 minutes.

One other thing I do is set my keggle on the concrete and once I get the IC flowing I hose down the keggle from all sides till it is cool to the touch. That thing is a big heat sink and cooling it helps in the process too. Took me about 20 to 25 minutes before I started doing that one extra step.

 

[CrazedArmadillo]

You waste lots of ice if you use it from the start, especially if you recirculate. I just use tap water and don't even think about recirculating until I hit about 120-130°. Even with 80° tap water in the summer, it only takes my chiller about 4 minutes to get that far. Last week with winter water temps at 59°, I hit 130° in 3 minutes. Only then do I switch to ice water (no recirculating) until I'm in the mid-80°'s, then I recirculate to get it down to pitching temps. Usually 15 minutes tops, and no more than about 10 lbs of ice.

 

[Grossy]

+1 on the tap water first to 120 - 140 degrees, go water a tree.

Days before I brew, I make as much ice, and chill as much water as I can in my refrigerators.

I live in Arizona, tap water in the summer time runs about 100 degrees, even still this will lower your 212 degree wort down to about 140 degrees.

After the tap water, I hook up my immersion chiller to a simple pond pump.

Place the pump in a large cooler, and fill the cooler with Ice and the chilled water. Place the return from the immersion chiller back into the cooler to re-circulate. If the return water is of 10-20 degrees higher temp than your tap water, then just dump the return, and refill with tap water, until that is no longer the case.

I went one step farther. I have a large stationary tub in my garage. I placed the kettle with 5 gallons of wort into the stationary tub. Then I would fill up the stationary tub with ice and chilled water, then place the pump in the tub hooked up to the immersion chiller. This way I got the benefits of the immersion chiller and immersion of the kettle in a ice bath. 30 minutes to 65 degrees.

I now do 10 gallon batches and have since made a counter flow wort chiller according to BobbyM's instructions.

 

[user 4295]

Heat transfer is all about temperature differential. Tap water temp, even on the reltively warm side, has plenty of delta-T from the boiling wort to provide a very fast, and efficient cooling on your wort down to ~100˚F (unless of course if you are brewing in Arizona in the middle of summer, LOL). Now you can create another large temperature differential with a closed loop ice water recirc setup, and get the wort down to lager pitching temp in no time. I usually only go through two 5lb bags of ice doing it this way.

 

[MrZ2U]

If I run tap first it takes more than 3x the water volume to bring the temp coming out of the IC down to temp coming out of the tap than it does to run ice water though it till it gets well below that. Its cool to drink after about 5 gallons of fresh icewater then I recirculate. 40lbs of ice cost $2.50 where I get it...doing it the way I do I use the least ammount of water in all the ways I have tried and also cool it the fastest.

When I am done I put soap in the cooler and wash all my gear so Im making the most of my water use. Those 5 gallons I collect comming out of the IC are used to water a shrub by my garage or the flowerbed in front of my house by the way...since someone brought up watering a tree. The soapy water is also dumped on the lawn. Read about the vitues of "washing" you lawn in Jerry Baker, America's Master Gardener: Green Grass Magic

Thats just what I have found to work best for me.

 

[Stankonia]

I start with just regular ground/tap water as well and collect the run-off which is perfect to use later for cleaning and mixing with oxy clean since it is already hot. Then I start recirculating with ice water.

I don't wait for the wort to reach a temperature, instead I just feel the temp of the outflow water coming from the chiller. Once it feels like it won't drastically melt ice upon contact I start my re circulation.

 

[MrZ2U]

oh, I dont measure temps either, when it feels cool I recirculate. I only measured it when testing the different methods.

Good call on collecting the hot water for mixing with oxy. I didnt think of that!

 

[barhoc11]

Another tip for those in cold weather areas... I leave the cooler I use for recirculating out in my garage overnight filled with water and let it get chilled down to near freezing. This way I can use that to recirculate once my tap water has done the bulk of the duty.

If I need to, I add some ice from my house freezer or snow if there is any on the ground. If there is snow on the ground, BOOM, you have all the coldness you could need to do a completely recirculated chill.

I am not sure how much you guys spend for ice but this easily saves me $4-$5 per batch.

 

[jholen]

I got a pretty cheap IC chiller, and am now upgrading to a whirlpool IC chiller and am planning on using the older IC chiller as a pre-chiller in a 5 gallon bucket with ice water to cool my ground temp water prior.

Hoping it works well!

 

[sddanc]

Thanks for all the input,

This past Sunday was brew day for me. At flame out, I began circulating tap water through the IC and it took about 3 minutes till it was cool to the touch. At which point I started collecting in my vessel and adding ice. About 10# of ice did the trick and I was transferring cooled wort about 15 mins after flame out. Luckily, even in san diego, my ground water stays fairly cold. cheers

 

[TyTanium]

Excellent! That's pretty quick, feels good, huh? What'd you brew?

 

[beerguy2009]

I have a side question about the size of the IC. I am moving into AG brewing and right now have a IC made of 1/2" copper pipe that is 25 feet long. Do I need a larger chiller, say 50 feet, to cool a 5 gallon batch or will it not make that much difference? I am looking at a recirculation system since I don't have a water supply in my garage.

 

[user 4295]

I have a side question about the size of the IC. I am moving into AG brewing and right now have a IC made of 1/2" copper pipe that is 25 feet long. Do I need a larger chiller, say 50 feet, to cool a 5 gallon batch or will it not make that much difference? I am looking at a recirculation system since I don't have a water supply in my garage.

I found I needed to move up to a larger IC when I stepped up to full volume boils.