Has anyone tried a recirculation wort chiller? Rather than dumping hot waste water, running it back through an ice bath in a closed loop system.
My brewing partner is looking at designing a system like this, just wondering if it has been done before. And if it is successful or not.
It works well once you get the wort down to ~120 degrees or lower. Above that, unless you have a high volume ice maker, it wouldn’t be cost effective.
You can save some of the hot water from the earlier stages and use for cleanup or run it into a washing machine for a second use. If you have a large container you can also save some, let it cool down and use it to water the garden if you have one.
The technique I use sometimes is to drop the temmp to 100F using tap water. The switch to a pond pump in a cooler, cooler filled with an ice bath to get down to lager pitching temp, ~46F. If there is enough snow I use that, as the supply is plentiful and free. Not much snow here this year.
We have snow on the ground right now in North Texas!
Before I simply used a dual copper coil, one in the boil kettle, one in a bucket of ice water. Then my wife collected the hot run off and used it in her washing machine.
Return from Austin yesterday. No snow at 6:00 PM, but maybe 2" right now. It will get above freezing again on Monday.
This is what I do. Sump pump in a ice water bucket > immersion chiller > return to top of bucket.
The initial hot runoff to get it to ~100*F is used to clean the MLT and anything else laying around in the brewery. I have saved hot water to clean the kettle, too but I rarely do that.
Here is a suggestion from a friend…
Our swimming pool is a constant 44-46 degrees F this time of year. Why not just run a closed loop system with the outside copper coil in the swimming pool?
I do something similar, recirculating the wort through a chiller down to about 100F running well water (I’m in Florida), then running through another pump with ice water.
I use the same technique as hopfenundmalz and BrewBama. I don’t recirculate until the discharge temperature is lower than the temperature of my tap water. Recirculating warm water back into your cold reservoir can kill your efficiency.
Our swimming pool is a constant 44-45 degrees F this time of year. We will use this water for cooling, with a pick up in the pool and returning the heated water back to the pool.
This will only work during the late fall through early spring time of year. But it’s very efficient, with zero waste water.
I use my 15.5 gal. HLT with a HERMS coil loaded with ice and recirculate from the BK through the coil and back. it will cool to pitching temp in about 25-30 minutes. i also run the recirc pump in the HLT once some of the ice melts to act like counter flow. Topping of with more ice as needed.The down side is it take about 80 lbs of ice which is not an option for some. it helps if you have a large freezer.
Maybe overkill, but…
If you have that large a source of very cold water, use it. You definitely aren’t going to be swimming in it any time soon!