Cold weather, glycol, and wort chiller question

[carrsgarage]

During the warm weather months, I have no problem using ground water to chill my wort. The last couple of times that I brewed, I tried using a sump pump submerged in a cooler filled with ice water on an attempt to conserve water and was pretty happy with the results.
Now that temperatures here in the Northeast have dropped, my thoughts have moved towards filling the cooler with glycol and liter bottles of ice to recirculate. My thinking is that I could leave it in the cooler all winter long and it should work just fine. Am I nuts? Am I not considering something?
I also have a converted A/C unit that I was going to use for a future fermenter upgrade that I was thinking could be used to keep the temp of the glycol down, but I've heard that it isn't very efficient.

 

[speavler]

not clear on how the wort is being chilled. do you have coils submerged in the wort through which you circulate the water/coolant?

 

[carrsgarage]

Oops, I forgot to mention that. I could use either a coil immersion chiller or a counter-flow wort chiller.

 

[mongoose33]

I think what @speavler means is how are you going to cool the glycol solution? You can add ice to it, but that will dilute it over time and at some point it may freeze depending on temps.

 

[carrsgarage]

Oh, gotcha. What I've been doing is filling up soda bottles with water, freezing them, then tossing them into the cooler full of water. Once I'm done brewing, I put the bottles back in the freezer.

During the summer, I'd run some water through the chiller straight from the tap until the wort cooled down a bit, then I'd switch to the sump pump and recirculated water.

I've only brewed in the winter a couple of times and I'm really worried about leftover water freezing in my chiller (already had it happen once and burst a few coils in my old chiller). That's what made me think of glycol. As I said, I could run a converted air conditioner to chill the glycol, but is it the best way to do it?

Hope that makes sense.

 

[SanPancho]

Why dont you just use snow? Or if you’re freezing bottles, keep doing it. No need to mess with glycol unless you get a chiller setup.

 

[carrsgarage]

Well, I brewed this evening. It was 29° when I started at 4:45. My biggest concern was leaving water in my hoses or in the wort chiller, so what I did was to flush the water out using a sump pump in a bucket of glycol. It worked like a charm! Hopefully no burst lines for me.