Freezing an immersion chiller in a bucket of water?

[JuanMoore]

I'm thinking of coiling my feed hose into a large garbage can filled with water and frozen soda bottles.I figure the water should be close to freezing when hitting my chiller coil.Wouldn't salt water be better?colder?

The bottles will work, but not near as well as ice. The smaller the bottles the better. Salt will only allow you to use a higher ratio of ice to water while still being liquid enough to stir. It won't actually make anything colder.

 

[hillhousesawdustco]

A little off where the topic has gone, but back to the OP- i'm not sure if this helps with any laziness or energy efficiency but you'll use less water: i brewed 10 gallons of IPA today after moving out of the warehouse i usually brew in and back to my garage. didn't consider that i'd pulled both of my 10 ft frost-free faucets out of the ground with a backhoe a couple months ago so i had no way to hook cold water to my immersion chiller. I ended up with two garbage cans full of snow and melt off with a sump pump pushing the water back and forth. added snow every once in a while. worked pretty well and beats putting all that water down the septic tank.