more efficient use of wort chiller?

[gunsout]

so i was looking at the design of a hybrid worth chiller which is like a big CFC. Is it more efficient to pass the wort through the WC in an ice bath or pump cold water through the WC while in the wort? im asking for the efficiency both in time for cooling and use of water. I was thinking if you passed the wort through the chiller you could use the same water in the container and just continue putting more ice in.

 

[wilserbrewer]

I would prefer to pump ice water through the chiller, as an immersion chiller in the wort for a few reasons...

1. the outside of the wort chiller is easily cleaned, and gets sanitized in the hot wort.
2. You don't need a food grade high temp pump, and cleaning the pump is not an issue.
3. No need to clean and sanitize the inside of the copper coil.

Both methods are pretty efficient, but IMHO moving the ice water through the chiller is cheaper and easier, and less prone to infection.

 

[MX1]

So, you are asking if you should use the coil as a chiller (cold water in coil, in hot beer) or as a heat exchanger (hot beer in coil in cold water) correct?

The exchager will save you water, you will need a pump so you can recirculate the wort through the exchanger to get the most out of the system. And you can use your ground water at temp as a fist stage of cooling before you add ice.

Tim

 

[Cajun_McChicken]

I recently converted my 25' immersion chiller to a counter flow chiller by ramming through a rubber hose a la the wiki.

So far I'm much happier with my chilling time (under 10 minutes from boiling to 65F as opposed to 15-20ish from boiling to 75F (which is where I usually got impatient and just racked it)) but I do have a pump and the clean up can be a bit of a pain (though if you have a pump already, the additional clean up from adding the CFC is minimal).

 

[fermentednonsense]

I usually run straight hose water until I hit around 160* or so, other wise you are just wasting ice if you recirculate through ice bath. Once I hit that 160* I switch to the ice bath.

 

[breidenb]

I recently built a "easy clean double pipe" counterflow heat exchanger (ref recent BYO article). One nice thing about the straight copper piping is it's ~1/2 the cost of the copper coil tubing. Recirculating back into the boil kettle, it was able to cool 10 gallons of 205 F wort to 75 F in about 12 minutes (H20 at 65 F and 5 gpm, wort flow rate was ~ 2-3 gpm).

For lager pitch temps, I plan on adding a 10ft .5 inch diameter second stage that will be submersed in an ice bath once the wort temp drops to around 75ish. About 12 lb of ice should drop 10 gallons from 75 to 50. I might let the "house" water work a little longer and drop the second stage in the ice at 67ish, which should only need one 8lb bag of ice.

 

[eltorrente]

I have a counter flow and an immersion chiller. Water flows from my sink, through the IC sitting in an ice bath, then into the counter flow chiller. It gets so cold that I often have to open up my kettle valve quite a bit, or even all the way sometimes, to keep it from getting too cold. I can hit 62degrees easily and consistently using this method.