Cooling wort when ambiant temps are very high

Cooling wort has always been a challenge in the hot Summers in Kansas City. The water from the faucet is no 85 degrees. Even with a plate chiller I have to use about 100 lbs of ice to cool 15 gallons of wort. I spend the week freezing blocks of ice in plastic tubs and on brew day it takes all my ice to cool the wort. I have an idea I wonder if anyone has ever done. What if you were to take a chest type freezer and put a large plastic tub in it filled with either a brine solution or a glycol mixture. You should be able to chill the mixture down to around 0 degrees or even a little colder without the solution freezing. Then for chilling, put in a pump to circulate the solution through the plate chiller. In theory this should work great. You could also do the same with vinyl hose around a fermenter to control fermentation temps. For a test I just added 3 lbs of salt to 2 gallons of water and it is now at 4 degrees in the freezer and still liquid. Has anyone ever done something like this?

I do exactly that. The fridge I use for my kegs has the freezer in the bottom. I keep a plastic tub filled with brine and a copper coil in it that I use for chilling the wort.

The freezer in the bottom works great for when I have to move the tub in and out of it. 99% of the time the brine stays in there, ready to go. It's rare I take the tub out, but it's happened a couple of time when I needed the extra freezer space to chill bottles of booze that people bring to a bbq or another in the summer time. That way they don't have to keep going in and out of the house and making a mess in the house.

Interesting. I'm in St Louis and have the same issue. I was going to just buy a bunch of ice and let it go, but if I use some rock salt too, then I should be able to get the mixture lower in temp than 32*F. I'll chill using ground water to about 100*F, then use this mixture to bring it the rest of the way.

Thanks!

I have been going crazy over this and just realized the easiest solution. The key is to get cold water into the plate chiller. So I just filled a plastic trash can with blocks of ice and water. Then pumped the cold water directly through the plate chiller with my $35.00 sump pump from Harbor Freight. I recycled the water and easily cooled 15 gallons in record time.