CFC Techniques - Not Cooling enough - Help?

[LTDbrew]

I am doing 10 gallon batches of all grain and recently upgraded to the Chillus Convolutus CFC, but noticed the cooling amount isn't as much as i expected and very high usage of water. What are others doing to get their boil down to pitching temps quickly using a CFC? With the colder winter days, i should be able to get my boiling wort down to 65 F no problem, but struggle to get it down below 80 F.

Other relavent facts:
-Yes - I do have the wort going in the opposite direction of the tap water
-I am regulating the output of the Chugger pump to a slow trickle to get 80-85 degree 'cooled wort'. I can't reduce the output anymore without it shutting the valve off.
-I live in CT and the ground water is 40 degrees at this time of year so i shouldnt need a prechiller.
-I got the wort coming out of the BK and right into the pump inlet, then going thru CFC and into the fermenter. I am using the high temp food grade silicone tubing.

Do others recirculate the wort back into the BK to reduce the temp enough before going thru CFC? Let me know, any ideas would help! thanks!

 

[BrewCrewKevin]

That's what I would do. I would put a hose back into the BK and monitor the temp coming out of the hose. Once that's at 65-70, then move the hose to your fermeneter.

How long exactly is it taking you? 10 gallons is a lot to cool, but I agree, the groundwater should get that down relatively quickly.

 

[LTDbrew]

Didn't exactly time it, but probably between 30-40 minutes and the wort going into the fermenter was still at 80 or so...so i had to wait even longer for the batch to cool to pitching temps. Perhaps its just me, i dunno - figured i would pose the question to see if others experience this.

 

[reynolds5520]

Do you have it oriented with wort in at the top or the bottom? Wort in at the bottom will purge air and maximize contact.

My DIY counterflow chiller worked poorly the first time I tried it - wort in at the top - switching to wort in at the bottom had it working great.

 

[Indian_villager]

Is your water coming out of a spicket or faucet garden hose adaptor? You may just not have enough flow on the cold side. For my CFC I use a loop on the cold side that goes to a cooler full of icewater (pushed with a pond pump). I get lab ice from work for free so cheap on my part.

 

[LTDbrew]

I have the wort coming in on the top, but will certainly swap it so the air is purged.

Regarding the water in, i am using a garden hose from my spigot, the water flow is pretty good. I figured the best of both worlds is to setup a closed loop cold system, like you mentioned (saving on water and maximize cooling)..so i may put that into the project queue.

 

[Jipper]

May not make a difference if you pump the wort against gravity as reynolds suggested, but I always restrict my wort after the CFC, not before. Have water going pretty much full bore, and restrict the wort on the outlet of the CFC. Hopefully that helps!

 

[kombat]

I think trying to throttle back the flow is probably the opposite of what you should be doing. You want the CFC to be full of wort, making contact on all surfaces as it flows through it. If it's only a trickle, it's not touching all sides inside the chiller. An alternative would be to install a ball valve at the "Cold Wort Out" outlet of the chiller so you can constrain the flow at that point, allowing it to fill the rest of the chiller.

I use a plate chiller (which is really just another kind of CFC), and here's what I do after flameout.

• Hook my garden hose up to the "Cold Water In" port of the chiller, with the "Hot Water Out" hose draped into a bucket so I can collect the "waste" hot water and use it to clean my equipment. I turn on the hose and start the flow, pretty much full speed.
• Hook my Chugger pump up to the outlet valve of my boil kettle, pumping into the "Hot Wort In" port of the chiller. The "Cold Wort Out" hose loops back into the kettle, in a recirculating fashion. I open the valve, turn on the pump, and begin circulating wort, again at full speed.
• I monitor the temperature of my wort using the thermometer on my boil kettle. It drops very quickly from boiling, and within a couple of minutes, it's down in the mid-to-low 100's. When my waste water bucket is filled, I switch it out with another bucket, this time with a scoop of Oxyclean Free in it (again, to be used to clean up my equipment when I'm done).
• Once the wort temperature has dropped to 100° F, I turn off the tap and switch the cooling lines to instead circulate ice water in a camping cooler, using a second pump. Again, I run this with all valves wide open. By now, the waste water isn't appreciably warm, so I just circulate it back into the camping cooler (which is full of frozen water bottles and a bag of crushed ice from the grocery store).

This procedure gets me down into the mid-60s in about 15 minutes. I have a thermometer on the "Cold Wort Out" port of my chiller, so I can see the temperature of the wort coming out of the chiller. Using this configuration in a brew I did yesterday, the wort coming out of the chiller was registering at 50° F. I stopped chilling when the thermometer on my boil kettle dropped to 62° F, which only took 10 minutes yesterday (but I live in Canada, and yesterday it was -20° C outside).

 

[day_trippr]

I think the person who said plumb the wort to the bottom end nailed it.
From the numbers it's pretty clear that CFC is not full of wort...

Cheers!