Is my Immersion Chiller OK??

[Bisco_Ben]

So I decided to build a new immersion chiller since my last one was getting a bit old and tired. As I wound the coils around my corny keg to fit the mold, everything looked great. Then as I began bending my ends up in order to have them go straight up and out for in/out flow attachments, I happened to bend the copper in 3 places. I know this is exactly what you dont want to happen and it did, and then loud curse-words ensued. So moving on while still pretty damn pissed I managed to make a very ugly yet I guess functional chiller, yet there are still 3 little sections on the bends that are slightly bent in and not perfectly round anymore. When cold water is pumped through I get a maximum of juussst over a gallon a minute, when attached to my kitchen sink. So based upon this information, do you guys think my chiller is ok? or should I just deal with the $50-60 wasted on the copper coil and just get a new one? I absolutely HATE not doing things correctly!

 

[Snafu]

I wouldn't worry about it at all. When I was using an Immersion chiller I would slow down the flow to just over a hard trickle to get the maximum heat absorption.

 

[Bisco_Ben]

True, so I guess the flow rate isn't the biggest concern then. My older immersion chiller was only a little bit better at like 1.1-1.2 gallons per minute but I am still really pissed off about the kinks. Are kinks (let alone multiple kinks) in the copper tubing detrimental to the performance of the chiller? Or should I not see TOO much of a difference?

 

[day_trippr]

I'd guesstimate I'm running around 3-4 gallons per minute through my ~40 foot 3/8" IC (fwiw, when I tested our new well about 16 months ago I got just under 8 gallons per minute out of the same outdoor faucet through a 50' long 3/4" ID hose). It takes from 9 to 14 minutes to chill ~5.5 gallons from boiling to 65°F.

I would have thought it would take the same amount of water to achieve the same temperature reduction whether it runs slow or fast, but I'm not a thermodynamics guy, so I could be way off on that.

Anyway, you could cut out the crimped sections and solder a copper coupler in place to fix the IC up nicely. I have one joining the two 20' sections of tubing I made my IC from, it took less than a minute to fit and solder in place using lead free/silver solder and matching flux...

Cheers!

 

[Bisco_Ben]

day_trippr, seems to me that you are running your IC from an outdoor type faucet, used for hoses. I am using my kitchen sink and highly doubt that we get 3-4 gallons per minute, but that just gave me a good idea. I am going to run the sink by itself and see how much I get from just that per minute and then compare that to the results from my uggglllyyyy chiller and see just how much resistance the kinks are causing. I also do not know how to solder and definitely dont have the tools to do such a job so I would pretty much rather eat the 50-60 bucks and just try again if its that much of an issue. Any more input/help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[BrewKnurd]

I would have thought it would take the same amount of water to achieve the same temperature reduction whether it runs slow or fast, but I'm not a thermodynamics guy, so I could be way off on that.

Faster flow = faster heat transfer, but more wasted water, because you're not getting as much heat transferred to each particular molecule. If you increase the flow rate through your IC, the water will come out cooler, and remove less heat on a per gallon basis, but will be removing more heat overall.So you just have to kind of balance what your priorities are.

 

[day_trippr]

Yes, that was an outdoor faucet - I brew with propane so the closest I get to brewing "indoors" is in one of the garage bays, which I can reach from another outdoor faucet.

Anyway, unless you plan on shrugging off your mortal coil any time soon, learning to solder copper pipe can be a very handy skill wrt brewing. And, honestly, it's dead simple, you can learn everything you need to know at the Youtube School Of Plumbing

You could pick up a complete lead-free propane soldering kit for $20 at Home Depot.

Add a hack saw or tubing cutter for $10, pick up a couple of couplers for your tubing for another buck or so, and you'd have saved half the cost of replacing the tubing.

Plus - perish the thought - if you crimp the next one, what are you gonna do then?

Cheers!

 

[audger]

I would pretty much rather eat the 50-60 bucks and just try again

i dont get that type of reasoning... why not spend half that money on a nice torch and some solder and practice, that way you have the tools if you need them for next time, and the knowledge of how to do it...

i didnt have the tools to replace the wheel bearing on my car, so i could either pay $450 to have it done, or i could buy a $100 shop press and a $50 bearing kit and figure it out myself. then the next time i have to do another wheel bearing, it only costs me an afternoon and the cost of parts since now i already have the tools and knowledge to do it... saving me several hundred $$ each and every time it needs to be done. i dont understand wanting to, both, waste a whole bunch of money and not even bother learning anything in the process.

that being said though, it doesnt sound like its bad enough where you need to fix it in the first place. im sure it will work almost as well.

 

[Bisco_Ben]

ok so for a quick update, my kitchen sink that I always hook my IC up to runs at 1.25 gallons per minute while my chiller is at about 1 gallon per minute. Is that a difference that I should be concerned about?

 

[BrewKnurd]

i dont get that type of reasoning... why not spend half that money on a nice torch and some solder and practice, that way you have the tools if you need them for next time, and the knowledge of how to do it...

i didnt have the tools to replace the wheel bearing on my car, so i could either pay $450 to have it done, or i could buy a $100 shop press and a $50 bearing kit and figure it out myself. then the next time i have to do another wheel bearing, it only costs me an afternoon and the cost of parts since now i already have the tools and knowledge to do it... saving me several hundred $$ each and every time it needs to be done. i dont understand wanting to, both, waste a whole bunch of money and not even bother learning anything in the process.

that being said though, it doesnt sound like its bad enough where you need to fix it in the first place. im sure it will work almost as well.

As some point, unless a person lives out in the woods, they pay for convenience at some level. You find the effort and time involved in fixing your car, or buying soldering tools and figuring out how to use them, to be less of a cost than the cash. Many people are on the other side of the equation. Neither answer is better or worse.

Taken to a real extreme... if its always better to do it yourself than for over some cash... why didn't you build your computer from scratch and design an operating system and use that to post your message on this board?

 

[BrewKnurd]

ok so for a quick update, my kitchen sink that I always hook my IC up to runs at 1.25 gallons per minute while my chiller is at about 1 gallon per minute. Is that a difference that I should be concerned about?

I vote no. You're going to have some loss of flow just going through the copper. Like you said, your previous chiller was only a little bit better.

 

[wattershed]

I have a 20' IC that I've only used once in a 10-gallon pot (which had 5 gallons of wort in it). I found that it took an awfully long time to cool, hardly an improvement over the ice bath/stirring sans IC I did on my first batch. The water coming out of the output end of the IC was seeming as cold as it was going in, and I was taking that to assume it went through the pipe too fast to extract heat from the wort.

Without getting into gallons/minute, ballpark-wise, how much water do you guys generally have coming out of the exit of the IC? Should I be aiming more for a slight trickle? Logically speaking I know I need to slow it down next time, but what's your 'sweet spot', so to speak?

 

[zacster]

You could try to take the bend out with a vise grip. What I did with the bend in my chiller was cut it off as it was near enough to the end. It never affected performance in any case, I could still chill 5 gallons in about 10 minutes.

 

[wolverinebrewer]

I have a 20' IC that I've only used once in a 10-gallon pot (which had 5 gallons of wort in it). I found that it took an awfully long time to cool, hardly an improvement over the ice bath/stirring sans IC I did on my first batch. The water coming out of the output end of the IC was seeming as cold as it was going in, and I was taking that to assume it went through the pipe too fast to extract heat from the wort.

There be a couple of reasons the water didn't feel cold. 1) the diameter of the coil is small which will take longer than a larger one: ( 1/4" pipe will take longer than a 3/8"). 2) you may not have agitated or stirred the wort while the water was flowing through. It makes a gigantic difference!

Without getting into gallons/minute, ballpark-wise, how much water do you guys generally have coming out of the exit of the IC? Should I be aiming more for a slight trickle? Logically speaking I know I need to slow it down next time, but what's your 'sweet spot', so to speak?

Wrong, you want the water to go through as fast as possible. I use 5/8" copper and hook it to a 3/4" garden hose. It cools fast. If you have the Jan. issue of Zymurgy there is an article on page 53 that explains this whole process.
Their study was done comparing chillers that were 22' of 1/4" and 22' of 3/8" pipe. They used a garden hose with 68* water and an output of 2.5 gpm. When hooked to the 1/4" chiller, the output was reduced to 1.5 gpm while when hooked to the larger pipe, the flow stayed the same. They used no agitation. The total time to reduce the boiling water to 80* with the 1/4" chiller was 29:55 with a heat transfer coefficient of .05 BTU/sec-ft2-*F. The larger chiller cooled it in 20:54 with a transfer coeff. of .046.
Now the fun part comes in the fact that when the chilller was swirled around in the kettle at a rate of 1/2 rev./sec the time for the 3/8" chiller to cool went down to 8:01 with a heat transfer coeff. of .14! That's 73% faster just by agitating and increasing the dia.

Three main points they made were:
1) Maximize the flow rate through the chiller
2) Minimize the water temp.
3) Maximize the chiller surface area (agitation with the largest dia. possible)

When I started I used an ice bath twice and spent $10 in ice each time and it took 30 minutes. So I went and built my own from 20' 5/8" with 4 elbos and 2 straight pieces for the uprights. Even in summer, I can get it cooled in 10 min. and even less in the winter. It might be the best $48 I spent in this hobby.