Hello! i’ve been using a therminator for a while but it takes a lot of time (one hour) to chill 33 gals from 200 to 72F… im looking for a dudadiesel. What size do you recommend me for that size? i was thinking in a 23-40 or a 32-40
I dont use any pump in the process (and i know this is maybe a silly question) but can i use one before the wort chiller in order to increase the flow and be more efficient?
Thanks!
I believe in a larger setup you need to use 2 chillers chained together, one to prechill and the second to finish it off due to the sheer volume of wort etc. Might want to look into a second therminator or an IC set into a big bucket of icewater.
Indeed, i pre chill my cooling water to 53F…i dont know for sure, but i think putting a secundo therminator will increase chances of a possible contamination…:S
Plate chillers are easily steralized if you are that worried. id be more worried about the hour long chilling session personally
Plate chillers are much faster with a pump. The space is so thin though that there is a lot of resistance to flow. Buy a pump before a second chiller. Hot water is also a great way to sanitized them.
running hot wort through a pump before the wort chiller could cause any oxidation due to hot aeration? i’ve used a march pump at 190F and there is a lot cavitation, could that affect?
On my one bbl system I used a march pump and recirced the wort through a “chillzilla” type set up to reach as cool as I could get and then racked into conical to bring temp down to pitching temp. Worked great.
i believe oxidation cant occur pre-fermentation, if anything it will help your yeast work faster because of the oxygen in the wort.
Nope. You can’t aerate without air.
This has been working well for me for up to 30 gallon boils. I use a couple different configurations. ChillZilla with city water then through a MoreBeer heat exchanger in a bucket of ice with a thermometer and ball valve on the out port works pretty well. If I’m making a lager in the heat of summer, instead of the heat exchanger, i’ll put a therminator on an icewater loop as the second stage. This requires a second pump but you can drop the wort to lager pitch temps very quickly.
To sanitize, regardless of the chilling set-up I try to recirculate boiling wort through the cooling equipment during the last ten minutes of the boil. This generally works but sometimes the pump pulls too much gas from the boil action and the pump doest work well. When this happens, I try to calm the boil a bit or just start the recirculation immediately after flame out. (prior to turning on the water flow) The wort is plenty hot to sanitize the chillers and hoses for several minutes. Just make sure to purge the first bit of flow into a waste bucket before you return the flow to the kettle. You don’t want flush water from the last batch that didn’t drain out of the chiller in your fresh wort.
I use a therminator to chill 2+ bbls of wort. It takes a bit over an hour, recirculating with a march nano pump the whole time. I put a thru-mometer type thing on the outlet of the chiller and when the wort out gets under 70 I move the outlet hose to the fermenter and transfer the wort there. If it needs to drop a couple of degrees the glycol takes care of it, although this last time I let it go too long and it was 65F (the chill water was colder than it had been).
I considered using two chillers in series, but since I only have one cold water line available and the therminator is super efficient it seems pointless. The outlet water from the chiller seems close to the wort exit temp, and that is with the cold water going full blast. A friend has two he uses for his one bbl system and says it chills faster though, on a single water supply.
Do you NEED to use two chillers? No, but it might help, especially if you have more than one cold water supply. It also depends on your ground water temps - now that the weather has cooled it is not as big of an issue but during the summer that might have been nice to have.
If you are going to buy new plate chiller, bigger surface area of plates is better.
Duda diesel is fine place to buy bigger brazen chillers.
If you want it for commercial setup, you might have a problem with brazed chillers. Depends on inspector and state.
Assuming all connections are tight, there should be no oxidation risk since there is no way to introduce oxygen into the system. Any cavitation would be steam or gases that were already dissolved in the wort. Make sure the pump head is oriented correctly to clear out trapped air/steam. http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=11157.0
I’m also looking at Duda Diesel for a plate chiller (sorry, don’t mean to take this thread off course - but this may be relevant) and I have to ask; how would a brazed plate chiller pose an issue with local or state inspectors? Are you referring to health inspectors? Is this a “lead in the brazing material” thing, or were you referring to something completely different?
I use a therminator in my (new) 1bbl system. What I’ve started doing is putting the therminator in a plastic container full of ice water. I can get my wort into the fermenter in about 20 minutes.
The lead probably wouldn’t be an issue, but depending on your health codes you may have to have a heat exchanger that can be disassembled for inspection of cleanliness.