Will it cool fast enough?

[DavidSwede]

Background; Right now I use a homemade immersion chiller - standard copper piping set-up, nothing fancy. Im a bit obsessive about water consumption so instead of a tap blasting through water and it just heading down the sink I go for gravity assist and collect the water to use for cleaning the equipment later.

I was considering doubling the piping setup (i.e. 2 separate, connected coils), having it in an icebath and running the wort through the piping instead and directly into the fermenter where 20% extra, preboiled, cold water is waiting.

Does anyone have any experience with this method and does it cool the wort fast enough? And would doing a run with sanitation solution be enough to clean the piping between uses?

Thanks in advance for any advice

 

[UncleAvis]

What you are talking about is a counterflow chiller. I've never used one but there's a lot of info on here about them if you plug it in the search bar.

 

[cyberbackpacker]

I think your best bet, if you are going to make a second coil, is to make a second coil to go in the wort and "nest" with your current coil. Split your coolant to both "in" ports on the two separate IC's, and provided you are moving the wort by stirring/pumping, you will see a significant drop in time to chill.

 

[cegan09]

Lots of ways to approach this if you're trying to save water. What you are describing would work. You'd just need to experiment with flow rates and how large of an ice bath you'd need to get the whole volume chilled before the bath warms up too much.

Another option would be to leave it as an immersion chiller, and recirculate a closed volume of cooling water. I've done this once, and it does work, just takes some planning. Best approach seems to be start with just plain cold water, recirculate until you get the wort down under 150 or so. At this point the water you're recirculating will have warmed up a lot. Add ice at this point and bring it down again. Repeat with ice additions if needed to get to the temp you want. Again, it just takes a little experimenting to figure out the volume of water you need for recirculation to absorb that much heat.

If you want to go full fancy tools, you could consider a glycol chiller. It's fairly cheap to build one yourself. But using that you can limit yourself to a few gallons of chilling water tops, and not need ice. The chiller would keep the water volume cold while you recirculate.