big dissapointment with whirlpool chiller

[slanted & enchanted]

man, i'm bummed. i finally got the whirlpool chiller hooked up and it took forever to chill. i'm going to outline what i'm doing and someone can slap me upside the head and tell me where my stupidity is messing this all up.

first of all, i'm using a converted keg and making 14 or so gallon batches. i put my 50 foot immersion chiller in the wort and get the recirculating whirlpool going through the pump, which is the march model everyone has. i can see a slight whirlpool movement going on. it's no charybdis, but it is moving. so that's happening 15 minutes till flame out.

i hook up my garden hose to the chiller and run it for about 20 minutes, getting it to about 100. it's still hot as hell in indiana and our water can't be much cooler than 75. the chiller directs the hose water to the top of the wort (where it's warmest) down to the bottom and then up again. that seems to me to make sense.

at 100 i switch to the ice bath pump recirculation routine. i have a 5 gallon igloo with a pump in it that forces water out the spout at the bottom (where the water is coldest), through the immersion chiller and then it dumps back in the top of the igloo. i fill the thing with ice and keep adding more as it melts. i did not add salt; i'll do that next time. anyway, it took another 30 minutes to get down to 80, and then i just gave up.

the only thing i can figure is that the ice bath needs to be a bigger volume. and i guess salt would work. beyond that i'm stumped. i was hoping to pull a jamil and get that wort to 65 in 10 minutes.

[DannyW]

How's your flow rate through the chiller? If you want to save time run it full speed. You will use more water, but save some time. With a similar setup to yours, I get below 90F in 20min with 74F hose water.

If you are running your icewater through the little spigot on the cooler, I suspect that flow rate is pretty slow. I use a submersible pump in the bottom of a bucket with no spigot, and just pump out the top of the bucket. Don't load too much water in the ice when you start, just a quart or so to get the pump primed.

I think the cold water is suposed to go straight to the bottom, so the coldest water is near the coolest wort. That maintains the max temp differential over the whole lenght of the chiller. I suspect that matters very little in your case, though, since your are pumping the wort around and thus keeping it pretty well mixed up.

JZ has ground water in the mid-60sF IIRC (I asked him once upon a time), so his first stage is going to go a lot faster. I suspect we may never do better than 30-45 min with our warm water.

do you have any pictures of your rig in action that you could post?

[slanted & enchanted]

i actually took the spigot out and screwed in a 1/2" ID nylon fitting, so there's no really bottleneck there.

my flow rate is farily swift. the pump is a recycled one from something or another, so i couldn't tell you how fast it's going. i'll try and quantify that.

i just read push's post on chillers and i'm thinking i need more ice. i'm just going to load up my kegerator freezer up for next weekend. i'll take some real data down so i can get some actual numbers. probably should have checked that out beforehand. i'll get some pics up next week.

it's got to be just a fine tuning thing. it's working for so many people it's got to work for me at some point.

[DannyW]

Speaking of ice, I found blocks of ice don't work very well at all - the ice needs to be in cubes to get enough surface area to chill the water fast enough.

I used to freeze bricks of ice in my freezer, then break them up with a hammer but they didn't work so well. The small commercial cubes work great.

Cubes from trays would probably work fine, but dang that's a lot of time/work, and you aren't really saving as much money as you think due to the extra electricity it takes to run the freezer.

[Push Eject]

Keep in mind JZ does 5 gallon batches.

Push E.

[LBrewski]

I also have a similar setup ( but for 5 gallon batches); I would say that 20 minutes to reach 100f with 14gallons is really not bad.

I recently switched from using a pre-chiller to the submersible pump in an ice bath to chill down below 100f. Combined, on a fairly warm day, I got down to 66f in less than 30 minutes and was quite happy about this - compared to my previous results.

I found that you should not to put very much water in the ice bath for the submersible, I use a fairly small cooler ( 28 qt) and add only about 3 quarts of water, 20 lbs of ice cubes. I had plenty of cubes left in the cooler, I know I could have done this in an even smaller cooler with less ice.

[BDawg]

If you can, throw some salt in the cooler with the ice. That'll drop the temp even faster. Make sure you wash it off really well or else your prechiller will turn all green and rot from the outside in, though.

[slanted & enchanted]

cool. i just found out i have to squeeze in 6 days of unused vacation in the next 5 days (guess i lose a day). looks like i'll have some free time to brew a few batches and fine tune this thing.

i think one problem is too little ice. i'll load that thing up to the gills with ice and use just enough water to allow the pump to keep running.

i'll let you guys know how it works.

this is a little bit of a tangent, but once you break the 15 gallon or so mark it's probably time for a plate chiller, correct? it seems like 13-14 gallons will really push this setup to its limit.