Passive wort chiller idea (?)

[FullDraw]

I'm soon moving up to full boils and understand the need to get from boiling to pitching temps in a relatively short time. I've searched to no avail, so here's the question. Could you make an "effective" chiller from say a 5 gallon round cooler with your 25 foot of coiled copper in it, inlet at the top, exit through the bottom (former spigot location), filled with ice water, and a ball valve on the outside to control flow rate? A gravity step down system started by siphon. It seems that everything I read here says immersion chiller or counterflow. But to have a dedicated chiller unit, there's more protection for the coil upon moving it. I see the difference only being that the wort is traveling through the copper vs the IC way. Open my eyes to what I may be missing here. Your experiences and thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[pjj2ba]

It will work. I did that a few times. I personally always hated starting siphons. I finally upgraded to a pump and a plate chiller. One issue is making sure the insides of the tubing are clean and sanitized (I guess that is an issue with the plate chiller too). Also, same for the plate ciller, if your tubing is too small, you run the danger of it plugging up with trub from the boil pot if you don't have a good in pot filter.

 

[Brewers Hardware]

The problem is that both wort and water are poor thermal conductors and ice is a good insulator. What does that mean? Running your hot wot through a coil in ice water will work, but it won't be very effective unless you stirring the ice water. A warm pocket of water will form around the coil, insulating it from the ice water and the efficiency will be shot. That's why recirculating with an immersion chiller works so well; the cooled wort is continually removed from surface of the coil and replaced with hot wort until it's all cool.

A better approach (several of our club members do this with awesome results) is to use your 25' coil as an immersion chiller. Run tap water through it until you hit about 110*, then attach it to a sump pump that you drop in a 5 gallon bucket of ice water and recirculate the ice water. If you can recirculate the wort in the kettle, great, if not; moving it around makes a huge difference. Everyone uses the $39 sump pump from harbor freight. Harbor Freight Tools - Quality Tools at the Lowest Prices

 

[FullDraw]

To eliminate those warm pockets, couldn't I just drop the pump into my ice water and circulate that? Reverse engineering I guess. While it's been done with great success (the IC), I'm just fooling around with other possibilities.

 

[alpo]

Ha, me and my friend were just talking about this no more than 15 minutes ago.

His idea was to make a large stir plate for the bucket of ice water. Since sanitation in the ice bucket wouldn't be an issue, you could just use a powder coated bar magnet for the stir bar. In effect, it would be like making a chilled CFC, only without the outer hose. Whether or not it would be better than a CFC, I have no idea, but it would be interesting to see.

 

[Hegh]

Another thing to watch out for is that you would be siphoning almost boiling liquid. Make sure your racking cane/tubing is okay with that, otherwise you may extract some plastic flavors.