Ah...The Outback Brewer.

[shine]

Here is my dilemma - I'm brewing in central Australia. We're coming up on some nice hot summer days and thanks to city planners, the local pipes carry bath water. While it probably saves my electric bill (not needing to heat as much), it sucks for dropping wort temps after a hearty boil. I also don't like the notion of running water through my counterflow chiller and having it run down the drain. I'd like to build something better, more efficient and hippy friendly.

I envision something involving a large-ish reservoir of water, a pump and some type of high-efficiency chilling system. Water goes in to the through port of the chiller cold, comes out hot, goes back into the reservoir, gets chilled and recirculated back through. I'm not afraid to go the route of employing something like a glycol system. The hoses, the chiller, the reservoir... not issues. The chiller... BIG ISSUE.

Any thoughts out there?

 

[ol-hazza]

Fill your reservoir with ice?

 

[shine]

I did think about that. however, I'm brewing 10-gal batches. I'd need to invest in a sizeable ice machine to do this consistently.

 

[Hamaki]

Initially run your warm tap water to bring down your wort to about 100*F. Save that water for irrigation or other beneficial use. Then switch over to ice water - again saving the discharged water for re-use. Unless you have a very efficient refrigeration system I have doubts about a closed loop.

 

[boxofjibboo]

I fill water into my empty mash tun, add 1 g or 1/2 g milk jugs (as many as I have saved) with frozen water, then add a pond pump. I hook up the pond pump to my immersion chiller, recirculate the ice water. First gallon or two will come out hot, so you could pour those into another bucket for cleaning water later. It takes awhile, but you save water.


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[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

the issue is where you want to spend your money. on water or electricity or a disposable cooling source like ice or dry ice, either way its not free so as it goes the glycol system works like an air conditioner cooling glycol down and the glycol running around what it is your cooling which takes electricity.

the ice or dry ice cost money doing the same or electricity to make it so the only real way to save money is live in a cold region or have a cold running ground water source that you pump up and use for free except for the electricity running the pump, sorry those are the facts

the only thing I can think of is use solar for the electricity which cost money to start up but is free after the initial investment

 

[LabRatBrewer]

I kinda thought everyone down under used the no chill method.