pre chiller

[amandley]

I plan on making my own immersion chiller this week. The need has arisen since I have moved from Seattle to SoCal and the water temperature from my hose is consistently about 80*. ( I used to just do an ice bath and chill my wort in under 30 minutes)
The question is, can I just coil up my garden hose in a bucket of ice as a pre chiller or will the insulation on the hose prevent any real benefit?

 

[Pratzie]

Nah u want to pump ice water thru that immersion chiller coil for maximum affect by using a sump pump or other submersible pump. I don't think its gonna get it that low otherwise.

 

[JoshuaWhite5522]

I doubt you will see much benefit from a hose it ice. Ice water would be better but the hose would not give the best heat transfer properties, you could make a small copper chiller to sit in the ice water bath, and the would be very helpful. I would also put a smal aquarium pump in the ice water bucket to help mix the water

 

[Hex23]

Nah u want to pump ice water thru that immersion chiller coil for maximum affect by using a sump pump or other submersible pump. I don't think its gonna get it that low otherwise.

That, plus go ahead and use the 80 F water to get it down to ~100 first, then hook up a pump to recirculate ice water. This works well for me to get down to lager initial temps (~45F)

 

[oldstyle69]

while i agree that it wont be as good as using cold water first..its better then a kick in the head.

 

[mysteryshrimp]

I'm in Georgia. What I do to chill below tap water temp is to use the tap water to get to around 90, then take the 4 gallon pot of water that I put in the fridge the night before and siphon that through the chiller. If I need more, I'll add water and ice as that runs down, but generally I'll get it into the mid 60s with that method.

I made my immersion chiller with later conversion to a prechiller in mind. I'll still get around to that one day.

 

[Stankonia]

I had a similar issue in Florida, and I used a submersible pump and ice water. But you can't hook it up to ice-water right off the bat, unless you have a 30gal barrel of ice water ready. Here is what I did:

1. Hook my pump up to the chiller, sit the pump in a bucket of water.

2. Fill the bucket with the hose as the pump is draining it. I had the out flow hose from the chiller filling my HLT with hot water to use for cleaning.

3. While this was going on I starting creating a bath of ice water in a cooler.

4. Once the out-flow water from the chiller cooled down to 90-100 I simply took the pump out of the bucket and put it in the ice water bath. At this same time I put the outflow hose from the chiller into the bath also to start re-circulating.

I had some extra bags of ice to keep adding to the water as it was recirculating. I started bagging ice in my freezer days in advance instead of buying bags of it.


OR, if you want to go with something along the lines of what you're trying to do, just buy/build a 2nd immersion chiller and use that as a pre-chiller as just putting the hose in ice water won't be enough.

 

[drksky]

In Illinois, our water is about 75* now, so I was having problems getting my wort down to pitching temps. I bought 20' of 3/8" flexible copper tubing and wrapped myself a pre-chiller.

Last night, I used the submersible pump in my rain barrel to pump from the rain barrel through both the pre-chiller and wort chiller and back into the rain barrel. The 50 gallon barrel is full, so the pump was pulling the cold water from the bottom of the barrel and returning it to the top. That got me down to about 100*. I then added a large bag of ice to the bucket with the pre-chiller and enough water to give better contact. Rock salt would probably help, but I didn't have any handy.

Occasionally stirred the pre-chiller in the ice water followed by immediately stirring the chiller in the wort. I was able to get down to about 62* in 20 minutes or so.

 

[mysteryshrimp]

OR, if you want to go with something along the lines of what you're trying to do, just buy/build a 2nd immersion chiller and use that as a pre-chiller as just putting the hose in ice water won't be enough.

Your pre-chiller does not have to be as long as your chiller. If I had to do it over, I'd get a 50' length, cut to 35 and 15, and made both chiller and pre-chiller at the same time.

 

[tugbucket]

Nice info Stankonia, on my next trip to petco, I'm going to pick up a pump. Shame I got rid of all mine when I got out of the Salt Water nano-reef hobby.