My Ugly Pre-Chiller

The water from my garden hose is warm enough now that it takes too long to chill my wort with my immersion chiller.

I have some extra copper laying around from a previous project.

I have a spare hour.

I don't have a sense of design....

My immersion prechiller.....

That is not ugly. Functional is beautiful.

It's hideously functional. Who gives a damn what it looks like if it works. Well, that's the philosophy my wife appears to have anyway.

Not being a smartass, just seriously not knowing the answer...

What's the point of a prechiller? Why not just get a bigger or more functional chiller? Seems like it's just one more thing to deal with...

Damn Squirrels said:

Not being a smartass, just seriously not knowing the answer...

What's the point of a prechiller? Why not just get a bigger or more functional chiller? Seems like it's just one more thing to deal with...

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A prechiller chills the water that is going to chill the hot wort. If the water coming out of your hose is 90F, then you wouldnt be able to chill the wort to under 90F and it would take a long time to chill .
In BierMunchers pictures....you would put ice/water into the cooler, run water through the copper piping, and that "prechilled" water would then go to your wort chiller to cool the wort, make sense?

Yeast Infection said:

A prechiller chills the water that is going to chill the hot wort. If the water coming out of your hose is 90F, then you wouldnt be able to chill the wort to under 90F and it would take a long time to chill .
In BierMunchers pictures....you would put ice/water into the cooler, run water through the copper piping, and that "prechilled" water would then go to your wort chiller to cool the wort, make sense?

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Gotcha. No wonder it doesn't make sense. I don't have that problem here. :cross:

Damn Squirrels said:

Not being a smartass, just seriously not knowing the answer...

What's the point of a prechiller? Why not just get a bigger or more functional chiller? Seems like it's just one more thing to deal with...

Click to expand...

With warm tap water, I don't think a bigger immersion chiller would do much good. A prechiller gets the tap water to a colder termperature to make his existing immersion chiller perform more efficiently.

I bought an IC, but I didn't like how it took about 1/2 hour to chill to pitching temps. So, I built a counterflow chiller using Cheyco's plans, and plan on using my existing IC as a prechiller for the CFC.

Today I bought a small submersion pump (130 gph) for $18 at HD. After the tap water has cooled the brew to its coolest limit with the IC, I intend to place the pump in ice water and pump that water continuously through the chiller. Based on what I have read, it will work great. Usually only takes minutes to get the final temps down from what the tap water is. I tested the cheap pump today and it flows very well through the IC so I expect it will work very well. With this method it dosen't take an addition IC and this system should work better.

thebull said:

Today I bought a small submersion pump (130 gph) for $18 at HD. After the tap water has cooled the brew to its coolest limit with the IC, I intend to place the pump in ice water and pump that water continuously through the chiller. Based on what I have read, it will work great. Usually only takes minutes to get the final temps down from what the tap water is. I tested the cheap pump today and it flows very well through the IC so I expect it will work very well. With this method it dosen't take an addition IC and this system should work better.

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Thats nice to know, thats what I plan on doing. My last batch I ended up hand pumping ice water through my immersion cooler because it was taking forever. It is alot cheaper than buying more copper.

copper is rediculously expensive where i live and i was wondering since a prechiller doesnt need to transfer as much heat (it will stay the same temp once it reaches its lowest temp) would some cheaper metal work as well? or does copper transfer the cold to the water better?

That was really poorly worded.

Freaking HIDEOUS Bier.










I absolutely love it. Nice job man! :rockin:

Ize

I was just thinking of making a very large one of those for my swimming pool today. how well does it work?
JJ

You're going to make a prechiller for your pool? That's a lot of ice.

jaybird said:

I was just thinking of making a very large one of those for my swimming pool today. how well does it work?
JJ

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I'm brewing a 10-gallon batch tomorrow. I'll stick my foot in there and let you know.

I plan on submerging the contraption into the cooler with a lot of ice, a little water and some rock salt to accelerate the chiil-transfer-factor.

Bobby_M said:

You're going to make a prechiller for your pool? That's a lot of ice.

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I have been seriously thinking about it. in the summer here my swimming pool water will hit 95+ deg F and I live right down the street from an ice plant. Just not sure if it would chill enough water to make it worth the expence. if it would it could double as a heater in the winter. what do ya think?
JJ

BierMuncher said:

I have some extra copper laying around from a previous project.

I have a spare hour.

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Extra Copper?! With the price of copper that looks like a little more than some extra. Spare hour? I have a one year old I am lucky if I get a spare ten minutes to, uh, you know what with SWMBO!

Just kidding Bier....it looks great and should work great. Is your ground water that much warmer over in STL? I am in southern indiana and I usually don't have a problem with my CFC.

Cheers

wop31 said:

...Is your ground water that much warmer over in STL? I am in southern indiana and I usually don't have a problem with my CFC.

Cheers

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I just compare my cool rate to what I had back in February. Seems to be taking a lot longer and I'm not getting as drastic a cold break.

I'm brewing tomorrow so I'll see how this works.

BierMuncher said:

I'm brewing tomorrow so I'll see how this works.

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whatcha brewing tomorrow??? I am going to brew tomorrow as well. I was hopeing to get it brewed today but UPS arrived late
JJ

Cool. Looks like something from a Tim Burton movie.

BierMuncher, you don't KNOW ugly!

Look at this bad boy!



This weekend's project is to clean it up, actually. It works crazy-good (dual coils, lots of surface area), I get wort to pitching temps in like twelve minutes, but DAMN it's U-G-L-Y. It'll be nice, though, once I get it all cleaned up (I'll post "after" pics when I'm done).

grrtt78 said:

copper is rediculously expensive where i live and i was wondering since a prechiller doesnt need to transfer as much heat (it will stay the same temp once it reaches its lowest temp) would some cheaper metal work as well? or does copper transfer the cold to the water better?

That was really poorly worded.

Click to expand...

I live in Houston what I did was buy a cheap thin water hose fill my ice chest with 2 bags of ice and water. I coil the cheap hose up into the ice chest then hook it to my IC and run the water pretty slow its works pretty good so far but its still not the peak of summer yet so we will see how well it really works in August.

jaybird said:

I have been seriously thinking about it. in the summer here my swimming pool water will hit 95+ deg F and I live right down the street from an ice plant. Just not sure if it would chill enough water to make it worth the expence. if it would it could double as a heater in the winter. what do ya think?
JJ

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You can probably lower the pool temp a bit by throwing huge blocks of ice directly into the pool. No need for heat exchange. However, you ought to work on keeping the water from heating up in the first place. You need a foil cover. This is just like the solar cover but instead of clear, it's foil just like the duct insulation (foil over bubble wrap basically). Cover the pool during the day when not in use.

Now for cheap heating, I built a huge panel of 1/2" black ABS piping, back and forth and mounted to the garage roof. It used 20 lengths of 10' pipe. Once you make sure the whole thing is filled with water, it doesn't put that much strain on the circulating pump. Using a valve, I could regulate how much water went through the heating coil. On a sunny day, the output water was an average of 3 degrees warmer than the input. In actual practice, it allowed us to open the pool a couple weeks early and close it a couple weeks late. I don't know how long it would hold up in the sun because the house was sold after 3 years.

I've tried both the pre-chiller method and the ice water recirculation method and hands down the ice water recirc method is the quickest and most efficient use of ice.

It's all about temperature differential. The delta T (differential) of tap water, even at 90˚F, and boiling wort is very large. Once the tap water has done it's job and brought the wort down to ~110˚F, then switch over to the ice water recirc (again creating another large delta T) to drive the wort down to pitching temp. This will require the purchase of a submersible pump.

With my 76˚F tap water it takes 15 minutes to bring the temp down from boiling to ~100˚F. Then switching the hoses and recirculating a five gallon bucket of ice water with a pump using two 5 lb bags of ice through the IC will bring my wort down to a lager pitching temp of 55˚F in about 5 minutes. That's pretty fast and efficient, IMHO.

I agree with John completely. If you want to make it seamless, you can connect the pump to the chiller right from the start. Just dangle your garden hose into the bucket and start pumping. Once your wort is 100ish, dump your ice into the bucket. This keeps you from switching your chiller connection from the garden hose to the pump. The alternative is to use cheap garden hose quick disconnects.

Bobby_M said:

I agree with John completely. If you want to make it seamless, you can connect the pump to the chiller right from the start. Just dangle your garden hose into the bucket and start pumping. Once your wort is 100ish, dump your ice into the bucket. This keeps you from switching your chiller connection from the garden hose to the pump. The alternative is to use cheap garden hose quick disconnects.

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That is an awesome idea Bobby! I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of doing that! And just when I thought I knew everything!

Its nice man, looks good.

the_bird said:

BierMuncher, you don't KNOW ugly!

Look at this bad boy!

This weekend's project is to clean it up, actually. It works crazy-good (dual coils, lots of surface area), I get wort to pitching temps in like twelve minutes, but DAMN it's U-G-L-Y. It'll be nice, though, once I get it all cleaned up (I'll post "after" pics when I'm done).

Click to expand...

You win....

Jaybird, I'm brewing a 10-gallon batch of Bass Ale but like you, my shipment didn't come until this morning so it'll be Friday.

That's okay, no better way to kick off a long weekend than with a new batch.

johnsma22 said:

I've tried both the pre-chiller method and the ice water recirculation method and hands down the ice water recirc method is the quickest and most efficient use of ice.

It's all about temperature differential. The delta T (differential) of tap water, even at 90˚F, and boiling wort is very large. Once the tap water has done it's job and brought the wort down to ~110˚F, then switch over to the ice water recirc (again creating another large delta T) to drive the wort down to pitching temp. This will require the purchase of a submersible pump.

With my 76˚F tap water it takes 15 minutes to bring the temp down from boiling to ~100˚F. Then switching the hoses and recirculating a five gallon bucket of ice water with a pump using two 5 lb bags of ice through the IC will bring my wort down to a lager pitching temp of 55˚F in about 5 minutes. That's pretty fast and efficient, IMHO.

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This is the reason I think a CFC + post-chiller will work better than a pre-chiller + CFC. See here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=30357

I actually tried a new method this past monday when I brewed an IPA that worked really well. I put my sanitized IC into a sanitized bucket with a spigot. Ran a hose from the ball-valve on my keggle into the bucket, turned on the IC, then started draining the keggle into the bucket. Had a thermometer in the bucket, and the temp of the wort stayed pretty constant at 80*F as the keggle drained. By the time it finished draining (10 min maybe) all of the wort was at about 80*F, fine for pitching. Picked up the bucket and put it higher, drained it into a carboy with some tubing, aerated, and pitched. Super easy for my first solo brewing adventure...only hard part was lifting a hot, full keggle up off the burner onto a raised surface to drain it.