Plate Chiller Fail

[mcb]

Longtime lurker, rare poster here. Been brewing a few years now, plenty of success and lots of "learning experiences". Today I had another "experience" but I can't figure out what happened.

Brewing a ten gallon batch of beer. Everything going swimmingly. Went to chill the wort with a 50 plate chiller which as been fickle but has worked okay in the past -- but today it just flat out wouldn't do its job. I kept recirculating the wort back into the kettle to try and get the temp down, but my Thrumometer kept telling me I couldn't crack 76. Even when I had the kettle temp below 100 degrees, I just couldn't get the temperature down.

I live in the NW, so the tap water is very cool here. I repositioned the chiller in three different ways and still no results.

The only thing I can think of is that the gauge on the Thrumometer is shot or it is affected by the ambient temperature -- which coincidentally was 76 at time of brewing.

It took me 90 minutes to get the temp down when it should have taken five. Does anyone have any idea why this was such an epic fail?

Attached (hopefully) is the setup and the evidence of the kettle temp and thrumometer reading. That was after about an hour.

 

[b-boy]

It can only be one of 2 thing s. Either your wort wasn't circulating or your water wasn't circulating.

 

[MidTNJasonF]

without knowing your ground water temp and the actual temp of your wort (I do not trust the Thrumometer in the slightest) it is hard to say. My 20 plate will get things down to within a few degrees of ground water temps if I run the output slow enough.

 

[WPStrassburg]

Stand the exchanger up. Wort in the bottom out the top. Water in the top out the bottom. You may only be flooding part of the chiller with wort with it on it's side as the top may become air bound above the outlet port.

 

[DRog00]

Sounds like you have clogged channels, or low flow.

Do you pump the wort through the plate chiller?
How do you clean the plate chiller?

I recently upgraded from the 40 plate one you have to the 30 plate 12" from Duda, and wow, times really decreased.
My cleaning consists of rinsing the unit out with high pressure (60psi from the faucet) water, each direction for 5-10 seconds, a few times over. I then put about 1 scoop of oxy clean in the reverse flow of the wort with hot water and cap it, forcing the oxy clean through. The next day, I rinse it out and let it dry. I do use a hop screen in my kettle to it from clogging.

 

[hvjackson]

I agree you're either not circulating wort or chilling water, or both. Just to reiterate some of the previous comments:

- Make sure your chiller is oriented properly. Look it up in the manual if it's not clear from the markings. There may be large pockets of air if it's positioned upside-down.

- What was your wort flow like? If it's just a trickle coming out, it doesn't matter how cold it's getting, it's going to take forever to bring your whole boil volume down.

Based on your exit temp of 75˚F (I *would* trust the thrumometer, unless you have some reason to doubt it), I would bet that your flow was extremely low and that's why it took so long. A march pump is capable of pumping at least a gallon per minute through a chiller normally, which means you can get your whole boil volume through once every 10 minutes. So clearly you were circulating nowhere near fast enough.

The solution is probably better hop particle management. You should also double-check that you don't have any kinks in your hose (this happened to me once while chilling with a plate chiller).

 

[Spellman]

One thing to consider is how you have been sanitising the lines. Why I ask is I'm pretty sure you are not supposed to run liquid hotter than 180° through the thrumometer. Its probably fine and likely something that people have suggested here, but I would be sure to double check it to be safe.

 

[MidTNJasonF]

Looking back at your pictures a second time I notice I see no valve on the outlet of the plate chiller. Is there one somewhere in the lines after the chiller?

The only people I have seen that have issue with chilling on a plate chiller were running their wort through wide open with not restriction. The typical successful setup involves a ball valve on the output of the plate chiller to throttle back your output. You want the input to be wide open with limited restrictions so you have full volume hitting the plate chiller. Throttle back your output to the point you reach target temperature out of the plate chiller. Your wort needs contact time with the plates for efficient thermal exchange.

My setup for my plate chiller and chilling process is: 1/2" three piece valve fully open on the output of my kettle with a quick disconnect fitting. 1/2" I.D. Silicone hose to the pump. 1/2" Silicone hose from the output of the pump to the quick disconnect input of my plate chiller. A 1/2" "Tee" fitting on the output of my plate chiller with an accurate thermometer in one side of the "Tee" and a 1/2" three piece ball valve on the other. I run this valve 1/3 to 1/2 open while chilling. Output from the valve is 1/2" Silicone tubing straight to my carboy or conical. I set it by dialing in my target temp on the thermometer. I can normally hold 66º~68º fairly easily with ground water temps. If I need it colder than that I recirculate ice water through the plate chiller in the opposite direction of the wort. I do not recirculate back to the kettle. I can run a 5 gallon batch into the carboy at ~67º in roughly 10 to 15 minutes. A 10 gallon batch takes a little less than half that, maybe 20 to 25 minutes. My plate chiller is a Chillhog Super 20 which is a long profile 20 plate chiller.

I have and used to use a Blichmann Thrumometer. It is probably the only piece of gear I have from them I find useless or untrustworthy. The readings on it were several degrees off from a known good calibrated thermometer. It now sits in my box of unused gear.

 

[passedpawn]

Make sure the beer and water are running in opposite directions. Otherwise, cooling is very very slow. Note in the pic below that the wort IN and water OUT are next to each other.

 

[mcb]

Thanks for the feedback on this. For what it's worth, the chiller isn't clogged. I've never used pellets and I have a great filter in my kettle that grabs the hops. As for the orientation, I turned it over, on its side, there was no improvement.

 

[hvjackson]

Ok, I think you need to calibrate or verify your thrumometer with a known good thermometer, but I seriously doubt it's off by more than a couple degrees unless it's sitting in the burner wash or you're brewing outside in subzero temps.

I also think you need to estimate or measure your wort flow rate. If you had a healthy flow rate and the wort was exiting the chiller in the 70s then it should only take a few minutes to get down to pitching temp. One of those two assumptions must be wrong.