Immersion chiller

nybrewsupply.com has 3/8" x 50' SS chillers for $67. Tough to beat that price for the quality and lack of aggravation.

 

My Dad built me an immersion chiller for my birthday out of 30 feet of copper pipe, it's just beautiful. Unfortunately he used lead solder and some pretty nasty flux to join a 20' and a 10' piece together, with the joint right in the wort. We're planning on cutting out the joint and resoldering it using silver solder, but I'm wondering how dangerous it would be to use it once in its current state. Obviously lead isn't something you want to be ingesting, but just how much would get into the wort over the course of brewing?

 

I built mine, mostly because I got a good price on the coil of tubing - $20 for a 50' coil of 1/2" tube - it would have been almost $100 to buy a premade of that size, and normally the tubing along would have run $50 or more.
even including vinyl tubeing, clamps, attachment adapters and the tubing bender, I spent less than the tubing alone would normally have been.

 

Your third option is Using ice instead of wort chiller

 

In the vast expanses of my mind, the 'design' of the wort chiller is all wrong to begin with. Just one circle laid on top of the other. Not the most efficient way to reach all of that hot wort and carry the heat away. I have a design in my mind that at least uses ovals to fill in that empty hole in the middle, but it would be a b1tch to manufacture.

 

There is a fishbone/double helix version, basically overlapping circles staggered to each side. Like this:

 

Someone's stolen my great idea AGAIN! Who makes it?

 

The one's I have found online so far are homemade. I remember seeing one listed on a website for some brew store a long time ago, but not sure who it was.

 

Some call them a ribcage design - that's how I made mine.
I saw something like it on another forum, and figured out how at home.

 

In my brain, I was working on something like this.

 

I had forgotten all about "The Wasp." I think that's the one with really small diameter tubing (and not much length) that you're supposed to bounce up and down in the wort the whole time you're chilling.

 

That's the one I was thinking of!

 

The best efficiency boost for me in my cooling system was buying a fish pond pump and pumping cold water through my pre and post chilled (I just stick them both in my kettle). For simplicity's sake I fill a bucket with tap water and pump from there to get down to 120 or 100 then switch to my ice bath and eventually do closed circuit on that once the water coming out of the chiller is cooler than the ground water. I plan to build up a pump so I can create a whirlpool and increase wort contact to the chiller, that's expensive though...

I suppose my point is, the usefulness of an immersion chiller is all in you using it in a way that works well for your environment. The biggest complaint I have heard of plate chillers is that they clog.

 

What pump do you use? I bought a small pond pump but the amount it pumped (all having to do with the miles of tubing it has to pump that water through) was not enough. Too weak. I guess I need some suitable specs for a decent pump if I get to my scheme of pumping ice-cold water through a chiller. BTW, does anyone use ice w/ rock salt to cause a deeper dive in temps?

 

I have done that before. I didn't feel like the risk of sending salt through everything was worth the negligible change in performance.

This is the pump I have, per @barfdiggs suggestion:
http://www.amazon.com/EcoPlus-72832...0925&sr=8-7&keywords=pump submersible ecoplus

The first one I got had a busted part but I got it swapped out and this one works great. I used their fitting to step down to 1/2" barb and then put together another 1/2" barb to 3/8" because I couldn't find one off the shelf at home depot.

 

As far as salt to lower the temperature of the ice bath, my pond pump's instructions stated that it was not for salt water.