Glycol cooler on the cheap!

[Ramdough]

I hope I did not get your hopes up too high.... But I need some advice.

A friend is giving me a water cooler from some old film development equipment. I plan to use it for a glycol cooler for my e-brewery counter flow wort chiller.

I plan to have the cooler circulate chilled glycol/water (nontoxic kind) to a reservoir that will act as a large chill battery. I then will use a pump to pass the glycol through my counter flow chiller. The intent is to be able to have an abundance of chilled glycol for use on demand when I need it. I bought for $12 a used water heater to use as my storage tank, but I am having second thoughts. I have to clean it very well since it appears to be full of crud. As an alternate plan, I have a large plastic barrel that I could insulate and use. The plastic barrel is already clean.

What do you guys think?




Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

 

[Ramdough]

Btw, I thought the water heater was a cheap way to get an insulated tank that looks nice from the outside. I still think my reasons are valid, just need to make sure the tank will not be too painful to get clean and operate for many years.

The 34 gallon plastic barrel has a gasket in the lid and the lid is the size of the entire top, so I would have a lot of access for cleaning or dropping in submersible pumps. Plus I don't have to worry about the plastic barrel leaking. But, I have to come up with an insulation plan. I thought of putting it in a 55 gallon steel barrel with insulation fill between the barrel layers.


What do you guys recommend?


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

 

[kal]

My 2 cents:

You can't use a closed system to chill boiling wort to pitch temp as the chilling fluid that comes out the other end will be greatly heated and would heat up the remaining fluid in the tank in no time. No glycol chiller is going to be powerful enough to cool it down fast enough with any sort of wort flow rate. For a chiller to chill liquid on demand fast enough would require something very powerful, probably the size of a phone booth or small car, and in the tens of thousand of watts power usage.

Kal

 

[Ramdough]

Kal, thanks for the response. I am not sure if I described everything well, or I may be missing something. Below is more of an explanation.

What I was going to do was have 35-40 gallons of glycol at 0 degrees F. The idea would be that I would start chilling my reservoir much earlier (maybe a day or two) and build up capacity.

I am using keggles, so 10 gallons of wort my by around my max capacity.

So, 10 gallons at 212 F to pitching temp of 70 = 142 change.

35 gallons of glycol water at 0 degrees F. 70 degree delta to the pitching temp but 3 times the volume.

I have not looked at the heat capacities of the two liquids, but I would guess that I would be in the ballpark. If both have the same specific heats, the combined liquid temp would be in the 40's. Perhaps I will loose too much time and not be able to chill fast enough.

I would throttle the coolant flow to keep it at the right wort temp.

Am I missing something in this scenario?




Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

 

[kal]

0F cooling fluid is very cold which is great.

As long as you can pass that fluid through the CFC in one pass to chill whatever amount of wort you want to chill, it will work exceptionally well.

If 35-40 gallons isn't enough to chill in one pass (ie: you recirc the cooling fluid back into the coolant fluid holding tank) then it won't work well as you'll heat it up from 0F pretty fast.

You'll have to do some tests or figure out the math behind this, but my gut reaction is that 35-40 gallons of 0F liquid should be enough to chill your 10 gallons of wort. Being at 0F really helps as it means you'll be able to flow the chilling fluid slower.

Let us know how it works out - I'm curious!

Kal

 

[Ramdough]

Hmmm, I was hoping to recirculate, I could try that first and if that does not work, I can pump from the insulated tank to my plastic barrel, then pump it back afterwards.

Based on my numbers, the glycol will average out to 46 degrees (assuming wort and glycol water have the same Specific heat). So, even if I dump hot glycol into my source tank, my cooling liquid will still be pretty cold. I would just have to adjust my coolant flow rate. My plan was to use a DC pump so I could control speed easily.


This is sounding a bit more complicated than I was hoping if I can't recirculate to one tank.


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew