Wort Chiller Woes
During the summer months my tap water is at about 80 degrees. I use a "garden cart" and fill it with water, set my boil kettle in it and swirl the water. After a few minutes, the water is hot and I dump the water and refill. After doing this a few times, the temp is down to 100 or so degrees, I replace the water once more and add a bag of ice to the water and the temp drops very quickly below 80, total time is about 40 minutes. My plan is to add in an immersion chiller to help this process. Once I can afford a prechiller, I hopefully won't have to move my boil kettle any more...cause moving 5 or 6 gallons of near boiling wort is just a little unsafe.
if you have the cash you can buy a plate chiler for half the price as the homebrew shops but you need to look at the details (how many plates what size ect ) just look in ebay for stainless plate heat exchangers.
Said it before cannot praise a plate chiller enough. That was taken on a 90 deg day, and I could cut back on the flow a bit and it would come out at 65 deg. Worst case scenario for you desert folk is if it came out at 100 deg, your carboy would be filled w/ 100 deg wort, in 5 min, then you could ice bath it, lot easier dropping 20 deg than 140 deg. Quick back flush and a boil and its clean, I giggle every time I use it.
Do you need a pump to use it?
Id rather use a prechiller than do partial boils.
Rooster wrote:
Do you need a pump to use it?
Naw it can be gravity fed, The thrumometer I think is a must however, I can make the wort adjust from 80 deg to 62 deg back up to 80 deg within 10 seconds controlling the flow w/ the ball valve on the kettle. Flow rate is definately a factor. Although I use a pump,everything I have read of gravity users praise the same results.
Sorry to be so Noobish, but what exactly is a prechiller and a plate chiller? I've never heard of these before nor have I seen anything about them. Curiosity demands that I find out more! As for the topic at hand, I just use a bath tub full of ice water and that does the trick nicely.
Adios
heres one
http://www.northernbrewer.com/pics/full … inator.jpg
water in one way wort in the opposite direction
thirstydean wrote:
Sorry to be so Noobish, but what exactly is a prechiller and a plate chiller? I've never heard of these before nor have I seen anything about them. Curiosity demands that I find out more! As for the topic at hand, I just use a bath tub full of ice water and that does the trick nicely.
Adios
Never a problem to be noobish.
A plate chiller is a chilling device that is comprise of a series of thin metal plates fused together in such a way that small channels snake their way through the welded together plates. There is two independent sets of channels in the plate chiller. You pass your hot wort through one channel (via hose hook-ups) and you pass cold tap water through the other channel (often connected to your garden hose. The hot wort enters the chiller and exchanges its heat through the metal plates to the cold water on the otherside of the metal plates. The wort runs out cooled down close to what the tap water temperature is.
In some parts of the country, the ground water doesn't get all that cool in the summer months. You can't get the wort colder than the chiller water is right? SO to comabt this warm tap water a prechiller is employed. The simplest version of this is to attach a coil of copper tubing to the garden hose from the tap. The prechiller gets dropped in a bucket of ice water. The exiting water is connected (via hose) from the end of the copper coil to what ever wort chiller you are using (whether its an immersian chiller or a plate chiller). The prechiller is often just a second immersion chiller.
I hope that explains it well enough.
Buy yourself a submersible aquarium pump (less than $20 ) put it a cooler get some ribbon clamps and some 1/2 inch hose that will fit on your pump. Fill the Cooler with enough water to cover your pump, then fill the cooler with ice. Attach the hoses to you immersion chiller, and fire her up.