Volume of Water Required for Cooling

[ListerH]

So rather than invade my kitchen every time I want to brew, I am building a setup in the garage.
The one issue I have is that I don't have a water supply there and without the need for either connecting a hose all the way through from the kitchen (my wife isn't going to like that!) or carrying a pot of boiling wort into the house to cool it, my idea is to set up 2 reservoir tanks...

One filled with water that I can also dump some ice in that then can be pumped through my immersion chiller and the other to collect the hot water on the other side. I'll leave the water in the second tank and then when it comes to my next batch, I just reverse the direction etc.

The question is if I go this route, how much water? (how big do my tanks need to be?)
(I currently just attach my chiller to a cold tap and don't measure how much water I use)

I brew small batches... <3GL so I think this setup is going to be viable in terms of not needing too much water.

Any thoughts on this and/or if there is a better way I could approach chilling without a water source welcome!

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

I think your approach is viable given your brew size, but it is also dependent on how cold you can get the chill water.

 

[Qhrumphf]

So you're gonna pass from a cold liquor tank to a hot liquor tank. It's highly efficient and how all efficiently run commercial breweries do it.

Use that collection tank as your hot liquor for another batch.

Seriously.

 

[Beholder]

If you use conservation of energy, and you wish to lower 3 gallons by 140 degrees (boiling to room temp), you would at minimum 10.5 gallons (freezing to room temp). However, the temp gradient at the end would be very small, so heat transfer very slow. Rounding up to 15 gallons should work and provide reasonable cooling gradient.

 

[ListerH]

My reckoning is that without buying ice and just spending a couple of days harvesting ice from the ice maker in my freezer I should be able to dump enough ice in to get the cooling water down into the 30s

 

[Keith81]

Your idea sounds much like my setup. Doing 5 gallon batches, I start with about 7-7.5 gallons with 10 lbs of block ice (I freeze it in 1 gallon ice cream buckets, roughly 5 lbs each) in my MT. I collect the first 5 gallons in my HLT then add another 10 lbs of ice and 2.5 gallons of water to the MT and recirculate from there. So I use 10 gallons of water and 20 lbs of ice in total to get 5 gallons of wort down to 65 F.

 

[Gnomebrewer]

If you use conservation of energy, and you wish to lower 3 gallons by 140 degrees (boiling to room temp), you would at minimum 10.5 gallons (freezing to room temp).

That only really applies to a water bath, or constantly recirculated water. The first water pumped through the chiller will come out far warmer than room temperature (if pumped slowly, it'll be nearly boiling). Overall, it is far more efficient than a water bath.

 

[Gnomebrewer]

I'd estimate you'd need about double your wort volume, plus some ice. So 6 gals of water.
Pump the first half of the water through without ice (it won't really matter if it's at freezing or room temperature) then add ice for the remainder. Pump slowly and constantly stir the wort for maximum efficiency.

 

[ListerH]

Your idea sounds much like my setup. Doing 5 gallon batches, I start with about 7-7.5 gallons with 10 lbs of block ice (I freeze it in 1 gallon ice cream buckets, roughly 5 lbs each) in my MT. I collect the first 5 gallons in my HLT then add another 10 lbs of ice and 2.5 gallons of water to the MT and recirculate from there. So I use 10 gallons of water and 20 lbs of ice in total to get 5 gallons of wort down to 65 F.

This actually got me thinking about having a vessel of ice water and using a second immersion chiller in that tank so that I can have a closed recirculation loop... possibly a tidier setup... then I just have to do some physics to figure out how much ice water I need in order to ultimately equalize this and my kettle at room temperature....