Any Experience With Inline Immersion to Plate Chilling?

[KPaul]

I live in Central Florida and my tap water just isn't that cold. It takes forever to get my wort to anywhere near pitchable temps. I currently use a copper immersion chiller but am considering getting a Therminator plate chiller to use inline with my immersion chiller. Water from spigot through immersion chiller in a bucket of ice and on to the plate chiller to do the actual cooling.

Has anyone here done this? How much of a difference did you notice?

 

[duboman]

The reality of this is that the cooling water is your limiting factor, if the water is not cold enough or rapidly displace the heat then it will still take forever as you'll need to throttle the wort flow.

Consider setting up a pre chiller with a bucket full of ice water to cool the water source first.

For example, in Chicago, ground water in the winter can be 50 and my counter flow will chill 5 gallons to 60 in about 10-15 minutes. Currently the ground water is closer to 70 and it now takes ~30 minutes to get to ~68

You could also chill to whatever temp you get, then put the vessel in a swamp cooler with ice or a ferm chamber until you get to pitch temp and then pitch the yeast.


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