Circulating ICE water for CFC

[The Pol]

I am re-rigging my stand for a HERMS and have had the idea of filling my 10 gallon HLT with ICE water to pump through my CFC to chill my wort. Has anyone ever tried this? I would be recirculating the water and replenishing ICE as needed. 10 Gallons of 32F water would seem to me to have alot of room to absorb the heat from a 5.5 gallon boil. What do you think??

 

[5 Is Not Enough]

My CFC is 25' of 3/8" od tubing . If I'm gravity draining, the flow is very slow and I can't run tap water through the chiller slow enough for it to get even luke warm. You will probably not see a major increase of temperature in your reservoir and will probably not even need 10 gallons.
What you're mentioning is a super efficient way of chilling, a you may actually over chill.
If you are gravity draining and haven't build your chiller yet, I'd suggest going away from the widely accepted 3/8" OD copper and upping to 1/2" for better flow. You will probably not need 25', as is generally suggested here, either.

 

[Bobby_M]

You might actually get away with gravity draining the ice water if your HLT is high enough. You don't need to flow the water that fast. Then when you pump your wort, you can regulate the output temp by controlling the flow.

 

[The Pol]

SORRY, not a CFC, I mean a immersion chiller, I want to run the ice water out of my HLT, through my March pump, thorough the immersion chiller and back to the HLT to run back through the ice and down to the March pump again... anyone done this??

 

[Bobby_M]

The only thing I'd suggest is that you run off the coolant into some other container for cleanup or out onto the lawn for the first few minutes of cooling. There's no benefit to running 180F water into the icewater container. You have much cooler makeup water in the tap. In fact, I wouldn't start adding the output back into the ice until it's about 80F or less.