• Please visit and share your knowledge at our sister communities:
  • If you have not, please join our official Homebrewing Facebook Group!

    Homebrewing Facebook Group

Heat Transfer Glycol/Water vs Ethanol

Homebrew Talk

Help Support Homebrew Talk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Surly_goat

Hop Head
Joined
Feb 15, 2018
Messages
76
Reaction score
17
Curious if a 30/70 Glycol / Water mix will transmit heat better than a Ethanol mixture (ie RV Antifreeze)

Have a bath sitting at -10c but the fermenter it's pumping through the coil of won't drop below 1c now. I'd like to cold crash at 0c ideally.
 
I don’t think so. Antifreeze is ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. If you diluted ethylene glycol with water even 1/4th or so the volume at -10C it will freeze
 
He's asking about heat transfer. I'll just point out that in working with W/W heat pumps we calculate the heat transfer as 500*gpm*∆T when water is used. That comes from gpm*8.34 being the pounds of water through the exchanger per minute and 60 minutes in the hour. The specific heat of water is 1 BTU/lb•°, Hence the formula. When an antifreeze is used, whatever it's composition, the manuals say to use 485*gpm*∆T. This says that the effective specific heat of the antifreeze mix is 0.97 that of water, whatever the mix is and, as that can't be right, it says that it is pretty close to this for any mix that is likely to be used. As the difference in transfer is only 3% between water and mix I'd assume that it is even less between different mixes. IOW, I'd assume the performance of your system will not change appreciably. This is not your problem. The problem is that a change in ∆T from 11 °C to 10 °C means a 10% reduction in heat transfer (much larger than the probable transfer difference from changing coolants) and that at an 11° rise the heat leaking into the fermenter from the ambient is equal to the heat that can be transferred out to the bath. To solve the problem you clearly need to either
1)Get the bath colder
2)Minimize heat incursion
3)Implement some combination of 1) and 2)
 
Last edited:
I don’t think so. Antifreeze is ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. If you diluted ethylene glycol with water even 1/4th or so the volume at -10C it will freeze

You are incorrect sir. This anti freeze was ethanol based and it was 100% liquid at -10c. Glycol can also go below -10 as long as it's at least 25% glycol.

Everything working fantastic now. Don't really need it as cold as I was making it so the point is kinda mute. Holds lagering temperature to a tenth of a degree. Couldn't be happier. Currently a 50/50 water glycol mix. Will likely add some foam around the hose for efficiency otherwise it's back to focusing on beer.

IMG_20180426_212504.jpg
 

Latest posts

Back
Top