Here's my 1.5 cents!
I was going to go the route of the rectangular cooler but the price was up there. I then found the Igloo Ice Cube and read that some people were using that and fly sparging with it with great success. It is also better insulated than the round orange deal. I went that route and was happy. I have since gone to batch sparging and couldn't be happier. The only thing I would do different is go bigger because I tried to put 27 lbs of grain in it to batch sparge 12 gallons of wort and ended up sparging 2x because I couldn't get the volume of water in there that I needed. I found mine for 24.99 but prices have gone up a bit. Here's one at target for
34.99 and it is bigger than mine.
http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/sr ... B000F6UJ5K
I also bought a zymico cooler converter but couldn have built one myself if I had read enough. The bottom was a copper manifold but I moved to the stainless braid thing to batch sparge. The copper manifold didn't have the same flow rate as the stainless braid.
SO, I now have a
1 Igloo Ice Cube
2. Zymico Converter
3. Home Depot Brass Valve (I pickled it first to get the nasties out)
4. Stainless Steel braid. I also used the braid from the hot water heater and not the toilet. I'm not sure if that is a good idea or bad idea but I had one in the garage and it works well enough.
