TheKodiakWay
Member
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2014
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While in Lowe's today I ran across a 60' roll of 3/4" ID copper for.... $40. I'm undetermined on how well this will work for cooling, but decided to swoop it up anyways. I currently BIAB and have a 24 plate chiller, which drops 5.5 gals from boil to 70 in 7 mins. I run a March pump and whirlpool back into the bayou kettle to get a nice gunk cone before I pump to the fermenter. Standard operating procedure...
My thought is to run an outer jacket around my current kettle, and place this copper between the kettle, and metal jacket. Chiller flowing top down through the copper, and H2O running bottom up through the jacket. This way I can use the extra jacket volume as insulation/temp control during mash, and change to cold H2O for the cooling. I'd be chilling through the copper, and the outside of the kettle simultaneously while also whirlpooling.
I could even put a triclover in the outer jacket, and install a removable heating element. The element would never touch the wort, just the outer jacket water. With the outlet opened on the top, there's no chance of pressure build up. Would a 5500W element get the inner 7.5gal of wort to boil though?
While the current system works quite well, I'd like to give this a try. In my head this should work.. Or would I be better to run some 3/8"-1/2" through the inside, and create an all copper CFC? Or some 1-1.5" pipe over the 3/4" copper and create a large CFC?
My thought is to run an outer jacket around my current kettle, and place this copper between the kettle, and metal jacket. Chiller flowing top down through the copper, and H2O running bottom up through the jacket. This way I can use the extra jacket volume as insulation/temp control during mash, and change to cold H2O for the cooling. I'd be chilling through the copper, and the outside of the kettle simultaneously while also whirlpooling.
I could even put a triclover in the outer jacket, and install a removable heating element. The element would never touch the wort, just the outer jacket water. With the outlet opened on the top, there's no chance of pressure build up. Would a 5500W element get the inner 7.5gal of wort to boil though?
While the current system works quite well, I'd like to give this a try. In my head this should work.. Or would I be better to run some 3/8"-1/2" through the inside, and create an all copper CFC? Or some 1-1.5" pipe over the 3/4" copper and create a large CFC?