Due to circumstances that I won’t go into I find myself having to move away from the Portland/Vancouver metro area.
I’m not sure just how the water availability will be and I may have to consider doing no-chill. I was wondering if I could compromise and chill to maybe 120-130 with an immersion chiller then let it chill the rest of the way on it’s own.
When I lived in CA, I did this, but I’d chill down to ~85F or so before putting the fermenter in a chest freezer overnight.
If you’re using a temperature-controlled fermentation chamber like a chest freezer, this would work. You’d probably want the keep the freezer no warmer than 50F until you got the wort to pitching temp, then you could raise it to ~58F or whatever you usually do. It’s still not ideal. Maybe buy a different chiller (cf?). Pre-chilling the water can help, too.
By whirlpooling I reduce the hose water significantly. The set up was pretty simple, only expense was the pump.
Don’t know what your tap water temp will be, but FWIW: I use an immersion chiller, which everything I’ve read suggests is more effective than counterflow. My Summertime water can be above 75°F and I can still get the wort to ~60°F by running a prechiller. Just another coil that sits in a tub of ice water and I run the tap water through it on the way to the immersion chiller.
For several years my standard practice was to chill to around 90° and then let the chest freezer bring the wort down to pitching temperature. I would often brew at night and oxygenate/pitch yeast the following morning.
It isn’t compatible with low-oxygen brewing, but otherwise it didn’t cause any issues I could ever detect.
These days, I chill to 130° and then recirculate ice water through the chiller using a pump until I get down to pitch temperature. This has saved a lot of water.
In the summer, I chill to as much as possible which is about 85*F then chill to pitching temp which usually takes overnight. I’ve not had a problem. I need a pre-chiller setup as mentioned above.