How do you save your cooling water?

[Jim R]

I recirculate ice water in my simple cooler / pond pump / immersion chiller set up. The week before brew day I start making ice in my small chest freezer. I make 2 batches of ice cubes and 2-3 milk jug ice blocks. On brew day at the start of the 60 min boil I fill my cooler with 3-4 gallons of water and put the first 2 ice blocks in to start chilling the water. At 30 min I add the last ice block. At 15 min I add the ice cubes.

I initially pump water from my garden hose first for about 5 min through the immersion chiller to get the wort temperature down to about 160 degrees or so and just dump this water on the lawn after I have filled my cleaning buckets with hot water. Then I switch over to the ice cooler recirculation system and finish cooling to my pitching temperature which usually takes about 20 min with no further water waste.

 

[Mr. Vern]

homebuilt Glycol Chiller

Frozen jugs will help overcome the high temp rise on your glycol storage. Add as needed. I would estimate 800 BTU from 1/2 gallon of frozen water, probably close to what the refrigeration circuit is good for (2/3 ton or so)

 

[Bassman2003]

I use an immersion chiller and in an effort to reduce water usage, or at least have multiple uses, I utilize my lager fridge for the heavy lifting. The run down to 90F for ales is with hose water that gets put into my HLT for PBW cleaning and rinsing. I then pull out three, 3 gallon plastic buckets full of chilled water that I store in the lager fridge. This yields about 8.5 gallons of 32F water which is good for about 30 degrees of chilling. I run the water right back into the buckets and put them back into the fridge. For lagers I use the hose water with some added ice to get down to 75F then switch to the chilled stuff. I also slow the flow down when I start with the chilled water to give more contact time.

Not saving the planet but it is efficient and a little less wasteful.

 

[k-daddy]

I purchased this holding tank to capture the RO waste water. The waste water is then used for the initial cooling of the wort by pumping it through a pre-chiller (old IC set in cooler w/ice water) ahead of the PC, then into the emptied MT for system cleanup when finished. Once I fill the MT with the hot water, the waste water goes back into the holding tank along with any additional cooling water and used for watering plants… no waste.

 

[Dr_Jeff]

Hooked up my sprinkler to the hose yesterday and watered the front lawn for an hour or so.

I hook up a sprinkler and water a flowerbed.

 

[JJinMD]

I store it away until brew days, but I will try to describe it in some detail. I have an old radiator (no leaks). I connect a garden hose from the output of my wort chiller to the bottom hose connection of my radiator. The water fills the bottom of the radiator and moves up until it reaches the opposite corner of the radiator where the output connection feeds a 5 gallon bucket. In the bucket is a pond pump that pumps the cooled water through another garden hose to the input side of the wort chiller. The radiator leans against a boxfan which cools the radiator fins. I can get down to ambient temperature pretty quickly and if need be, can add a frozen milk jug to the 5 gallon bucket to boost the cooling.

If I can get a chance to brew next week I will post a pic of the setup for you. In full disclosure, I got this idea from another website for a similar, but different hobby where a larger volume of cooling water is generally used...

Here are some pics from a brew day yesterday of the radiator cooling setup I use. Yesterday was a 5 gallon day. Probably could have used a jug of ice in the bucket since the ambient temperature was 85F, but I wasn't in a hurry, so 45 min later I went from 212F to 90F and pitched my Voss!

 

[porterguy]

Saving water seems like a bigger pain than cooling the wort, No-Chill my friends.

+1000
BIAB, no sparge, no chill is 50L of water for 23L of wort. I still have to wash the BK, but no-chill saves a TON (i.e. many, many gallons) of water.

 

[Knightshade]

Sounds spot on w/what I do. After those 3 buckets, I'll recirculate into a big cooler filled with ice and enough water to keep it going. This water gets used to clean out the foundry.

Tweaked this process yesterday and ended up capturing one less 5G bucket of water

Instead of starting with room temp, then recirculating into ice water…started with ice water and started recirculating after capturing 2 HD buckets of hot water.

Flameout to 73 took about 10 minutes. 1st bucket was used to clean Foundry, 2nd to soak IC and other stuff. Icewater in cooler was used to rinse Foundry and water some of the plants.

 

[Bassman2003]

Sounds cool. One question: by starting with the ice water, didn't your ice get blown away by the time you really needed it? I guess you had to add more ice along the way?

 

[IslandLizard]

One question: by starting with the ice water, didn't your ice get blown away by the time you really needed it?

Yeah, using ice to chill from 210F to 150F is basically a waste of ice. Even 80F tap water will do that and about just as fast.

I save all the ice for where it counts most, to get it from 100-120F to pitching temps (~64-66F), and it's still fairly slow going to get those last 20 degrees off.

 

[NickTheGreat]

I almost always do two 5 gallon batches in a brew day. So I will use the discharged cooling water to fill my next batch's water needs. Then I’ll use it to do any rinsing/cleaning I can do, especially in the second batches cooling. Then I’ll water some flowers if it’s not too hot. Otherwise, I’ll just hook an estate sale sprinkler up to it and water the yard.

I’ve also thought about filling a kiddie pool full of it, but I generally prefer to brew without my kids around . . .

 

[ckil]

I use an aquarium pump in cooler with ice water. I let the first few gallons go into a separate bucket for hot cleaning water then move the return tube to the cooler to create a closed loop.

 

[RufusBrewer]

I have awful warm ground water here in southern AZ, so I would love to see what others are doing to drop their cooling water temps. I've tried running the ground water through a 'pre-cooler' coil that's in an ice water bucket, but that doesn't seem to make a huge difference.

I push Straight tap water through my immersion chiller until it drops to about 100°. Then I switch and pump ice water through my IM using a $25.00 bilge pump.

I try to collect the exhaust water and use it on my grass and plants. In the rainy season, this is not worth the effort.

 

[tripelthelightfantastic]

I get about 100L waste water from my RO system that goes into 25L buckets onto the balcony the night before brew day.
During autumn and winter those buckets are zero or slightly frozen and get pumped through an immersion chiller back into buckets for cleaning later