Wort chiller idea

[GRHunter]

I have about 20+ batches under my brew belt at this point and so far I have been pretty pleased with how the quality of my beer has been progressing. I am at a point that I am happy with my beer but I want to streamline the process to save time and effort. Overall I have made great strides in this area with the exception of one, chilling my wort. I added a pond pump to pump ice water through my IC and it worked great, but it was still the biggest pain of my brew day. I was thinking about how to simplify this process and I have a rough idea of what I want to do. I searched the forum to see if someone else had done something similar but I wasn't able to find anything. I am sure it's been done, but I just couldn't find it. Here's what I am thinking ...

Pump the hot wort through a 50' stainless steel IC that is sitting in a 10 gallon kettle of circulating ice water. I would need a March pump to push the wort through the IC, and I could use my existing pond pump to recirculate the ice water inside the kettle. I am assuming (hoping) that I can drop 5 gallons of hot wort from 210 degrees to less than 70 degrees with this system in about 10 minutes or so. Does this sound feasible?

 

[mattd2]

Whats your tap water temp like? Why not go for a counterflow chiller as that seems to be basically the same as what you would acheive with your suggestion but probably cheaper and less messing around on brewday.

 

[JuanMoore]

I chill my wort by draining it through a ~20' long coil of 3/8" copper in a 5 gal bucket full of ice water. It chills to pitching temp in the time it takes to drain into my fermenter (~10-15 min). I do have to stir the ice water as it drains, but as you mentioned you could use your pond pump for that. It takes a 10# bag of ice for a 5 gal batch, and 20# for a 10 gal batch.