Connecting wort chillers

[Joewalla88]

I want to connect my smaller wort chiller to my other wort chiller to make one bigger wort chiller. Would this be a dumb idea, and what would be a good way to connect them?

 

[day_trippr]

What type(s) of chillers?

Cheers!

 

[Joewalla88]

What type(s) of chillers?

Cheers!

Oh duh, a 25' and 50'x3/8" immersion chillers I think.

 

[day_trippr]

Ok, offhand, if they can both fit in your kettle and your cooling water runs below say 68°F the options would be to connect them either in series or parallel. I suspect a parallel connection would work faster at the expense of more complicated plumbing as you'd need a splitter and extra fill and drain hoses...

Cheers!

 

[Joewalla88]

Ok, offhand, if they can both fit in your kettle and your cooling water runs below say 68°F the options would be to connect them either in series or parallel. I suspect a parallel connection would work faster at the expense of more complicated plumbing as you'd need a splitter and extra fill and drain hoses...

Cheers!

I think I'm overcomplicating this in my head, and am now a little embarrassed for asking the question. I can just run my hose to a splitter and hook both chillers up at the same time. My idea was to tighten up the coil on the small chill and stick it inside the bigger chiller. Would that work? Am I missing anything?

 

[day_trippr]

Yes, just use something like this at your water source...

...then connect two hoses to your chillers, then one drain hose from each.

If you can fit the two chillers side by side I expect that would be the more efficient option, but if they won't fit like that, sticking one inside the other will certainly work...

Cheers!

 

[jwintersteller]

I use both ICs from my Brew Zilla 65 and 35 together in the 65 with 2 y adapters. I had just bought a Jaded copper IC and then read up about copper/stainless with LODO.....didn't want to spend more money on a stainless IC. Seems to work well for me

 

[Mad Mann]

Ive done this with two counterflow chillers. The beer portion is plumbed in series and the glycol portion is plumbed in parallel from two different closed sources. This gives me the flexibility and reduced time I was looking for. The diagram is an earlier version but you get the idea.

 

[Closet Fermenter]

Another option to get more “chill” is to make the smaller one a pre-chiller. I put one in a small bucket of water and frozen jugs of water. My garden hose connects to this one first; the water gets pre-chilled and then on to the immersion chiller in my brew kettle. This makes a much cooler input temperature to my IC than what comes out the tap.

 

[Bobby_M]

Running them parallel is definitely a big improvement and the basis of the Jaded chiller designs.

 

[redrocker652002]

Another option to get more “chill” is to make the smaller one a pre-chiller. I put one in a small bucket of water and frozen jugs of water. My garden hose connects to this one first; the water gets pre-chilled and then on to the immersion chiller in my brew kettle. This makes a much cooler input temperature to my IC than what comes out the tap.

I was thinking the same thing. pretty easy to set up and I think would be much more efficient

 

[Broken Crow]

You're getting good answers, but in 2 directions; ... Are you using tap-water to cool? What is the temp of your tap-water? Mine is 58°, but as I use a CFC, that's perfectly adequate for using as-is. Your groundwater temp may or may not be suited to the speed at which you want to chill and I suspect for half the homebrewers using immersion chillers, it's not cold enough..in which case, a second IC is thrown into a vessel full of ice-water and run in series with the IC in the wort... If however, 2 parallel IC's have enough motion of wort for effective heat-exchange at the groundwater temp you have, that might be more effective.
My suggestion would be to try a batch with them in parallel and constantly stirring or pumping the wort over them, and if you feel it is too slow, then get a basin (could be a picnic cooler wether or not it's been turned into a mash-tun), fill it with ice and put one IC in that, connected in series and try again. As those are pretty much your 2 options, try both.

 

[IslandLizard]

The only issue I see by putting them in parallel, the tubing being the same ID, is that one coil will not chill as efficiently as the other, unless you can reduce the flow rate in the smaller coil to match the output temp of the larger one.
Once set it should be fine for the foreseeable future.

I have a small copper coil I used in a bucket with iced water, ice packs and/or cubed ice for pre-chilling the water that goes into my plate chiller.
I only pre-chill toward the end of the chilling procedure to drop the domestic water temps from 55-70F down to 40s. It works, but not great, the flow must be reduced to a small stream (read: a fast trickle) to get any decent chilling efficiency.

I recently improved that routine, and now fill a (spare) bottling bucket with 4-5 gallons of pre-chilled water (from the kegerator) and some ice packs or cubes.
To get the wort down those last 30-40°F, once the tap water has done the big job, and doesn't chill much anymore, I just "run" the ice cold water from the bottling bucket through the plate chiller instead of tap water. It's a rather thin stream, yet more than a trickle, and takes about 15-20 minutes to bring a 5 gallon batch to pitching temps.
In short, just feeding the chiller ice cold water is faster than pre-chilling tap water, using a prechill coil.

The better solution is getting a bigger plate chiller. Now I understand why the long ones are better suited than short tall ones.

 

[Broken Crow]

I only pre-chill toward the end of the chilling procedure to drop the domestic water temps from 55-70F down to 40s. It works, but not great, the flow must be reduced to a small stream (read: a fast trickle) to get any decent chilling efficiency.

That part there is probably the key; With coil length there is a point of diminishing returns which I did not study fully while I still had an IC (I ended up turing it into a CFC). Sorry for the lack of specific time/temp here; but I recall that [with 3/8" tubing] in the first few minutes, by the time the coolant water has progressed about 10', it has already reached equilibriulm...it takes several minutes more before the wort temp has dropped to the point that it can make it 15'-18', and much longer than that before you can think about pitching temp.
It may mean some extra valves or changing out of supply lines, but I think you hit the nail on the head.
Personally, I'd try both methods and focus on circulating to wort to maximize surface contact/heat-exchange in the pot.

 

[Joewalla88]

You're getting good answers, but in 2 directions; ... Are you using tap-water to cool? What is the temp of your tap-water? Mine is 58°, but as I use a CFC, that's perfectly adequate for using as-is. Your groundwater temp may or may not be suited to the speed at which you want to chill and I suspect for half the homebrewers using immersion chillers, it's not cold enough..in which case, a second IC is thrown into a vessel full of ice-water and run in series with the IC in the wort... If however, 2 parallel IC's have enough motion of wort for effective heat-exchange at the groundwater temp you have, that might be more effective.
My suggestion would be to try a batch with them in parallel and constantly stirring or pumping the wort over them, and if you feel it is too slow, then get a basin (could be a picnic cooler wether or not it's been turned into a mash-tun), fill it with ice and put one IC in that, connected in series and try again. As those are pretty much your 2 options, try both.

That's what I might do. Try both, see which works best. My temp coming out of the tap is cold enough, I just want it to go faster still. I never thought of the prechill idea though. That's smart.

 

[day_trippr]

is that one coil will not chill as efficiently as the other

Who cares? Why handicap one chiller to make them "even"?

Cheers!

 

[Malticulous]

I use two in parallel in the kettle and can get sixteen gallons to water temp in less than 30 minutes.

I tried running tap water through a pre-chiller in ice water. It will get the ice to water temp fast and then your right back where you started from.

I might get a submersible pump to recirculate pool water, then ice water.

 

[T Murph]

I use a submersible fish pond pump in a 30 gallon SS pot of ice water with a 3/8 copper coil IC. I freeze several small food service steam table pans of water to control the water temperature that gets pumped through the IC. I put about 4 gallons of water in with the ice and top them off as needed. I capture the hot run off water to use for clean up afterwards. I usually reach pitching temp in 15 to 30 min depending on the temp I'm shooting for. I have used both plate and coil counter flow chillers in the past but IMO the IC works better. 1st the boiling wort sanitizes the coils of the chiller eliminating the choir of cleaning and sanitizing a CFC chiller and 2nd it totally eliminates the possibility of clogging the chiller with hop and trub debri.

 

[Bassman2003]

I have a NY Homebrew 50' 1/2" I.D. chiller that I augmented with my Anvil immersion chiller which fits right inside the coil of the NY Homebrew chiller. So I added more surface area just by connecting the two together. One input split which then returns to one output. Snow in Texas... The setup worked well that day!

 

[Joewalla88]

I have a NY Homebrew 50' 1/2" I.D. chiller that I augmented with my Anvil immersion chiller which fits right inside the coil of the NY Homebrew chiller. So I added more surface area just by connecting the two together. One input split which then returns to one output. Snow in Texas... The setup worked well that day!

This is kinda what I was thinking. Thanks for the pic.

 

[Bassman2003]

Sure thing. Chilling is a pain and needs to be as fast as possible!