I do what bug does, but I would be concerned about cleaning the inside of the heat exchanger. I guess people use plate chillers though.

ive seen someone use two emirtion chillers conected togeather one in a bucket of ice water and the other in the wort. im sure you could do it with the plate chiller and the wort chiller combined

That's some creative spelling!

You can do what you proposed but you better have a very large bucket of ice water as the heat exchnage will be immense and your water will warm up quickly. kind of the same concept of a plate chiller but not. I used to use a immersion chiller and a recirc pump. I would fill one buckt with water and another with ice water. PLace pump in water, coil in ice water and other coil in wort, pump it thru the ice water then to wort and recircs back to bucket water with pump. This worked good but was alot of equipment. Now I use a plate chiller and a pump and some ice water in the summer. Winter goes wort to pump to chiller. Some in summer but the incoming water goes thru a coil in a bucket of ice water first. This is the best and fastest way. I put the plate chiller in boiling water for 15 min while I'm mashing. Then soak in star san or sani clean to keep it sanitized thru rest of my brewing process. Hope this help. Good one spider!!

Haven't heard of those from the Emirtion Corporation? I hear they make fantastic immersion chillers.

As mentioned in prior posts, just ice water alone is not going to be enough to cool down the entire wort to pitching temps, but using the chiller to flow wort through a cool water bath does work well ... better than the other way around. I use my 1/2" chiller and pump for my HERMS mash temp control (recirculate mash water through the coil sitting in hot water ~6 degrees above desired mash temp). Once mash is done, the ~170 degree sparge water runs through the same coil during the sparge which helps to rinse the coil out. At the last 20 minutes of the boil, I place the chiller in the kettle, hook up the hoses, and recirculate the wort through the coil during the boil (boil stalls for less than a minute) ... this ensures that the inside of the chiller is adequately heat sanitized. At the end of boil, the coil goes into a cool water bath to heat up cleaning water. The water will need to be replaced with fresh and cool hose water as needed (use of ice reduced the number of times the water needs replaced). During clean-up, use the hot water PBW solution to recirculate through the chiller coil to clean out any debris.

I have tried using the coil both ways and the wort through coil works faster than pumping the cool water through the coil. After a couple of years cooling this way and literally several hundreds of gallons brewed, I have had no problem with contamination.

it all depends on whether you are welded to your immersion chiller - the best thing you can do to save water would be to go to a plate chiller. Much more efficient, faster, much less water.

If you have the space, you could use either your current IC or better yet a plate chiller, and just not throw the water away. Pump it through your plate chiller from 1 200L drum to another, or if your are clever and careful about how you handle the liquid return, back onto the same vessel. The hot water will float on top of the cold water and they mix surprisingly little. Cold water out the bottom, hot water back into the top... 200L to cool your wort, which will be plenty.

Or you could try out No-Chill, and use exactly zero litres of water to cool your wort.

TB

The happy medium without adding much in cost is to run 5 gallons hose water through IM chiller then hook to pond pump and drop into 10 gallon tote of Ice and water. Takes about 20 min or less total. The first 5 gallons I use for sanitizer solution and the second for getting wort and hops rinsed off equipment later. I just refill like 8 empty 1 gallon water bottles and stick them in freezer about 7 hours before chill time.