I just received a therminator for a present, can someone please recommend a pump that works well with the therminator. Thanks in advance.
I've used march pumps and chugger pumps with my therminator and see no performance difference. I would think any pump that is good for brewing would work just fine with the therminator. The most important thing is to have a ball valve on the "out" side of your pump so that you can control the flow of the wort through the therminator. This will allow you to regulate the temperature of the wort coming out of the therminator better. The therminator instructions also recommend installing a second ball valve on the "wort out" side of the therminator to ensure that the therminator is completely full of wort (no air pockets) in order to work at it's full potential. I've never added that second ball valve and haven't had an issue. I mount my therminator horizontally and I'm not sure if that is a factor or not.
The only pump I had on hand was a 3gpm pump pond and it took forever to chill the wort down. It took an 30-40 mins to get 5 gallons of wort from boiling to 90 degrees, it didn't even get it to pitching temp. Is this because I didn't have a more powerful pump? The therminator does say it needs a 5gmp pump. I just want to make sure that my issue was with the pump and not something else.
I know people who gravity feed the wort through the therminator and chill it faster. The manual also has instructions for gravity feeding, so you are incorrect in claiming the manual says you need a 5 gpm pump. It does say that it will chill 10 gallons of wort in 5 minutes time when pumping wort through it at 5 gpm. What temperature is the ground water you fed through the chiller? Might be a silly question, but are you pumping the wort with that pump or recirculating your chilling water with it? I notice you are in Texas. From the instruction manual: Instructions for Southern Climates: Brewers in southern climates have a particular challenge chilling wort due to the elevated ground water temperature. Cooling water temperatures can exceed 80F in the summer, making chilling wort to the ideal temperature (68 F) impossible. However, the incredible cooling capacity and efficiency of the Therminator chiller will allow the wort to be chilled much closer to the ground water temp, at a faster rate, and using less water than any chiller on the market. Obviously, wort flow rate and wort outlet temperature are trade-offs. A good rule of thumb (assuming 5gpm of water flow) is that the Therminator will chill about 3-5 degrees F above the cooling water temperature at moderate wort flow rates (about ¾-1gpm), and about 10 degrees F above the cooling water temperature at higher wort flow rates (about 1.5-2 gpm). Heat exchanger performance is not linear, so it is difficult to predict exact performance at conditions not shownin the graph below. Bear in mind that the performance graph is based on cooling the wort to 68F. If your cooling water is too hot to cool to your desired wort outlet temperature, you will need to use an immersion chiller in an ice-bath in conjunction with your Therminator chiller to lower the cooling watertemperature the additional degrees. Since the Therminator chiller will remove the vast majority of the heat in a very short period of time, much less ice will be consumed. A 20 ft length of 5/8” copper tube immersed in a 5gal pail of ice and water will usually be sufficient. Pre-chilling the cooling water, instead of post-chilling the wort in another exchanger, reduces the possibility of contamination since the cooling water chiller doesn’t need to be sanitized.
The wort is gravity fed into the therminator. I had a bucket of ice water around 68 that was being pumped into the therminator with the 3gpm pump. Does it matter if the ice water is below the wort, or should it be on the same level? Since its being pumped in, does it make a difference?
What matters is whether or not you were just pumping the ice water back into the bucket after passing in through the therminator or not. If so, you ultimately are heating up your ice water to the point where it's no longer effectively cooling the wort. In other words, ice water goes in the "water in" side of the therminator and exits the "water out" side as HOT WATER. So if you are letting that hot water return into your ice water bucket, it will melt your ice and warm up the chilled water in the bucket. Then it will be substantially warmer on the "next pass" through the therminator and no longer chill the wort effectively. Since you only have one pump, you'd be better off hooking a garden hose up to an immersion chiller in your boil kettle and pushing ground water through it until you get the wort down to say 90F. Then gravity feed the wort through the therminator with the ice water recirculating through it via your pump like you did yesterday. This way, the ground water gets the wort down from 212F to 90F, and then you are only passing 90F wort through the therminator with the ice water. This will make your ice water do less work and heat up less quickly. Or you can go get a march / chugger pump and do the following: Use the March (or Chugger) pump to pump the wort through the therminator (while your garden hose feeds ground water through the therminator) and then let the wort recirculate back into your boil kettle. Do this for about 5 minutes and all the wort will be down to roughly 90F in your boil kettle. Next, turn off the March pump and the garden hose. Disconnect the garden hose from the therminator. Now hook up your pond pump to the therminator and start recirculating ice water through the therminator. Then turn on your march pump and pump the wort through the therminator and into the carboy while the ice water is being recirculated through the therminator. This is what I do during the summer when my ground water isn't cold enough to get my wort down to pitching temps on a single pass through the therminator.
