My tap water is too warm for my plate chiller to bring the temp down past 80. I was thinking about running it through the chiller, sealing it, set my fridge to 60 and leaving overnight to get to my pitching temperature. Is this a bad idea.
In lieu of sealing your fermentor and leaving it overnight, could you set up the plate chiller so the cold "in" line comes from your tap, then through a bucket of ice-water, then into the chiller to get those last 20°? If that chills the wort quickly enough you could discharge the hot/warm water to the sink. If not fast enough, you could use a pond pump to recirculate the discharge water back into the ice bucket and replenish the bucket with ice as needed. That's assuming there isn't anything inherent in plate chiller design that would prevent that method. Or, get a summer home in Alaska
One thing that comes to mind is that wort compounds will be subjected to oxidation during the overnight chill, because you won't have the benefit of yeast to pick up the dissolved oxygen.
I just remembered I have an old copper coil chiller laying around. I think I’ll put between the tap and plate chiller immersed in ice/water in a cooler. I think that might work. Thanks for reminding me.
You are likely to be disappointed with this approach. Unless you have the flow set at something very low there isn't enough heat transfer between the coil and ice bath. What I find works best is to recirculate the wort using tap water through the chiller to get the wort down to ~120, then switch to a cooler of ice water (40 or below). Use a cheap submersible pump to send this 40'ish water through the plate chiller. To chill a 5 gallon batch I use about 5 gallons of ice water. This involves a trip to the ice house or pre-freeze several big blocks of ice to get the cooler down to 40. My tap water is 90 in the summer and this works well.
I use to use several 2 liter frozen soda bottles to put around or on top of my plastic buckets to help. Ales should not be a problem unless I post this on the internet...Cheers
