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It's an old 911. Mostly restored, but needs a new paint job at some point in the next couple years.

USP Propylene Glycol. It's not toxic if you happen to ingest some, which is a good thing considering it'll be running through a chiller in the beer. It's not cheap, but probably worth the price for the added safety factor. I've heard of other people using the RV Coolant you use to winterize...

And with the pipe wrap in place: The glycol I ordered finally showed up today too. Still waiting on a couple fittings, but otherwise I should have most of what I need. Hopefully this weekend I'll get around to rewiring the BCS-460.

Pex lines are in place for the glycol:

It works for fermentation vessels for a couple of reasons. 1) You're not dropping the temperature 100+ degrees F in a conical. 2) the cooling jacket is insulated. You'll get much more effective cooling with an immersion chiller. They're easy to clean anyways.

Here's what I'm basing the plumbing for the glycol lines on: Obviously without the plate cooler or cold room.

Four coats of waterlox and a bunch of paint later:

An updated version of this: http://byo.com/brown-ale/item/1877-build-your-own-glycol-fermenter AC coils go in the glycol to chill it, a submersible pump circulates the glycol through the lines. Motorized ball valves decide which conical gets cooled. Inside the conicals will be an...

Hopefully fairly rarely. The temp of the glycol isn't all that critical. So, I plan on giving a fairly wide margin on the glycol temp to keep the cycles to a minimum.

FYI, if anyone is looking to order from spraysmarter it looks like they have a coupon code "FJM2013" that's good for 10% off.

8 weeks, possibly longer.

Goes in the yard waste bin and the county composts it to sell back to gardeners.

~$300 for mine including the rest of the fittings on the tank. It's funny how quickly those add up.

Eh, it's a $40 pump. If it's a problem I can always replace it.

I suppose I could, but it wouldn't gain me a ton. With the current plan, I can have the pump turned on to circulate the glycol in the reservoir. The BCS has more than enough outputs to control the pump anyways. It's just another relay to add to the controller. The main restriction with the BCS...

Spraysmarter. Agrimart has them with free shipping if you leave them in your cart for a day or two though. I had ordered them from Rural King,but they had an 8 week backorder on them. My only complaint about the ones from Spraysmarter is that they must have been sitting in a barn or...

Near as I can tell, the standard chest freezer is ~400-500BTU. The A/C unit I have is 5,000BTU. Granted, the insulation isn't nearly as good, but it should be fine.

Yeah, there's a surprising lack of information out there on this. I figured people would be all about it, but I guess chest freezers work well enough for most people.

New thread created: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/diy-glycol-chilled-plastic-conical-fermenters-413406/

As requested in the main conical thread, I'm creating a thread for the fermenters I'm building. The gist of it is that this is (going to be) a BCS-460 controlled set of 3 15 gallon plastic fermenters. Heated via flexwatt heat tape and cooled via glycol. Why three fermenters? The BCS-460 only...