I see a lot of posts regarding the use of immersion chillers and just saw today's Beersmith email regarding building your own. What prompted me to post is when I again saw the reference to a garden hose adapter for use as cooling water, or joining 2 chillers.
I'd like to make a suggestion and although I've search for it on these threads to avoid redundancy, maybe I'm missing it in old posts so my apologies if that's the case.
Anyway, my suggestion may be especially helpful for those of us that pay for our residential water (plus my sewer bill is based on water usage! Double whammy!). My son and I brew 5 gallon batches, and picked up one of those large black pond liners (any tub will work as long as it is a bit bigger than your brew pot) as a water bath. I then put a small submergible pond pump (under $75 or so) in the water bath, fill with just a few inches of water and a 20 lg bag of ice. Place the brew kettle in the ice bath and connect the pump outlet to the immerision coil inlet. Connect a piece of tubing to the immersion coil outlet and leave the other end in the ice bath.
Turn on your pump (get one with an adjustable flow dial) and now you've got cooling from both external and internal sources. We find that the 20 lb of ice melts in about 10 minutes so we replensh with another ~10 lb or so. We are routinely seeing cooling from boiling wort to ~80 degrees F in 17 to 20 minutes tops.
Hope this is helpful!
Keith
I'd like to make a suggestion and although I've search for it on these threads to avoid redundancy, maybe I'm missing it in old posts so my apologies if that's the case.
Anyway, my suggestion may be especially helpful for those of us that pay for our residential water (plus my sewer bill is based on water usage! Double whammy!). My son and I brew 5 gallon batches, and picked up one of those large black pond liners (any tub will work as long as it is a bit bigger than your brew pot) as a water bath. I then put a small submergible pond pump (under $75 or so) in the water bath, fill with just a few inches of water and a 20 lg bag of ice. Place the brew kettle in the ice bath and connect the pump outlet to the immerision coil inlet. Connect a piece of tubing to the immersion coil outlet and leave the other end in the ice bath.
Turn on your pump (get one with an adjustable flow dial) and now you've got cooling from both external and internal sources. We find that the 20 lb of ice melts in about 10 minutes so we replensh with another ~10 lb or so. We are routinely seeing cooling from boiling wort to ~80 degrees F in 17 to 20 minutes tops.
Hope this is helpful!
Keith