Considering buying a homemade wort chiller on craigslist... good idea?

[MoonMaster]

I'm about to brew my 5th batch and I've been considering a wort chiller just because Im tired of waiting 45 minutes to an hour for an icebath to cool my wort down. Im just brewing extract batches so I know I dont necessarily *need* a chiller, but im willing to pay for the convenience. I found a listing on craigslist thats a good price but I'm unsure since it looks kinda sketchy.

Here is the listing:

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/for/2566169380.html

I brought him down to 50$ which I think is a good price, but its clearly totally homemade and I dont want to buy anything inferior. Is this a good idea? Should I buy this?

 

[day_trippr]

Yikes! That looks like a nasty Copper Spaghetti Monster!

You can get a brand new chiller delivered for about the same price. For example:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NZNJG2/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

Cheers!

 

[Cosper123]

Doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the one you saw but it appears to be overly complicated for no apparent reason. For my setup I have two coils hooked up together with one sitting in a bucket of icewater so the hose goes into that one and water is super chilled and then goes through immersion chiller and from there into a hose that empties into my pool. That's more complicated than you need and yet this guy puts aquarium pumps for some reason I'm not even sure unless his starts from a bucket no water pressure or something?

 

[MoonMaster]

My assumption is he is using the two coils and pumps to pump more water through it faster but yea it does look pretty gnarly. I really only care about it being efficient though, and the pumps were appealing but... I hadnt found any as cheap as that site was listed (cheapest Id seen was around 60 actually) so that is certainly something to consider.

 

[outside92129]

Ditto on the complicated pumps, i'd ditch those and just plug them into muni water. You can make your own for $20....

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

I don't think he was pumping water faster, I think he might have been pumping ice water through it. If that's the case, I'd think you actually have a pretty decent deal here (@ $50).

It looks like a lot of copper, and is a dual coil, which is a nice bonus. Add the ability to push ice water through it, and you'll be able to cool down to proper pitch temps for ale *or* lager with this sucker.

It ain't pretty, but at $50, I'd snap it up.

 

[MoonMaster]

Yea that was what I was thinking, having the pump and some cold water would probably work a lot better than the hot groundwater we have out here in socal... but damn is that thing ugly

 

[beninan]

If you can justify the price for the amount of copper and the two pumps, it may not be a bad idea to buy it, and re-bend the copper into something a little less hideous.

 

[craigger64]

Bought mine brand new on eBay for $54 and that included shipping.

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

Yea that was what I was thinking, having the pump and some cold water would probably work a lot better than the hot groundwater we have out here in socal... but damn is that thing ugly

In the summer here in SoCal, I can't chill to pitch temps with just our tap water. In the SoCal "winter", it's better, but still nearly impossible to get it all the way down.

Generally I'd recommend using hose water to get from boiling temps down to the 120 degree range (the flow rate of the hose is more important than the temp of the water at that point), and then switching to pumping ice water through the chiller.

You should be at pitching temps pretty quick with that method.

 

[Yooper]

It's ugly, but I think it'll work better if you can pump ice water with those pumps instead of using your tap water. My tap water is never higher than bout 65 degrees, and usually it's in the 40s, so I've never needed to pump ice water through mine. However, I think you may need to if you start making larger boils or go AG. I'd probably snap this up at $50.