Safety First

[AgBrew12]

I am a fairly new brewer (4 total batches) and finally had the opportunity to try out my new home made wort chiller last week. The chiller is your standard immersion copper coil with push lock fittings to plastic tubing which I connected to my kitchen faucet.

About 30 seconds into chilling using my chiller, the outlet side tubing blew off of the brass push fitting. Fortunately, no water got near the wort. However, I did receive a nasty burn on the upper thigh. Another couple inches higher and it would've been even worse...

Clearly, the tubing was not fully secured into the push fitting and the pressure from the high flow caused it to pop off. After a quick cleanup (and some cursing), I reconnected it (all the way) and lowered the water flow. The chiller then worked perfectly.

I own the fact that this was an obvious rookie mistake and is easily preventable. I wanted to share this to remind everyone that we are dealing with fluids at very high temperatures while brewing. If the proper precautions are not taken (think about what you are doing), things can go wrong very quickly.

Cheers ya'll.

 

[MaryB]

I never use full water pressure starting out cooling,open to a trickle(about 1/3 pressure) until the pressure from the heat lowers with the temp. Your first water coming out is going to be boiling and the tubing softens at that temp.

 

[bobeer]

Brewing can get dangerous real fast if you don't watch what you're doing. I've been burned by the IC several times! Not to mention all the propane fireballs from using a crappy lighter. Ha.

Are you using hose clamps to secure the lines to the end of your IC?

Speaking of this I need to get new hoses for my IC. The water coming out is so hot it has shaped the line all weird on the out line. It's permanently bent to the side and it's causing more pressure to build up then there normally would be.