wort chiller

[anderj]

With the current price of copper I threw a wort chiller together for 45 (yea 45 bucks!)
and used it on my first batch the other day. I put it in with 20 min of boil left and it seemed to cook the hell out of the vinyl tubing that was connected to both the input and output. The vinyl was hot and super flexible. When I ran the water through it it turned a milky white, does this affect the strength? Will it crack or something like that, or is it ok?
thanks again
-ander

 

[Seabee John]

The vinyl was hot and super flexible. When I ran the water through it it turned a milky white, does this affect the strength? Will it crack or something like that, or is it ok?
thanks again
-ander

no it should not effect the performance of your tubing at all. I've got a few pieces of tubing like that. You just need to keep a watchful eye toward sanitation when it comes to tubing. I started out with a simple chiller connected to vinyl tubing as well and the only problem I found with it is the propensity for lower flow rates when it would heat up and bend or kink.

 

[abracadabra]

This is overkill I'm sure,

but I didn't like the idea of vinyl draped over my boil pot the last 15 minutes of my boil and I wasn't crazy about trying to use the soft copper tubing as handles to swirl the chiller around either so I added a couple of elbows to the copper tubing and used 2 straight sections of 1/2" brass pipe as the handles. That way all the copper in used for chilling and none for handles.

Back to the vinyl:

I got 2 each 6' stainless steel braided washing maching hoses and connected them to the brass pipe and then I connected the vinyl garden hoses to the washing machine hoses. That way I don't worry to much about anything melting when I put it the the boil pot that last 15 minutes