I have a 50' 1/2" MoreBeer Immersion Chiller that I fit with a whirlpool arm. I got new kettles to replace my keggle. I got it fit with all my add ons. The pot is shorter and wider than my keggle was and 5 gallons of wort only goes half way up the coils. My thoughts are either, hack off the uprights and slide a hose over the coiled section to make a counterflow chiller, or try to expand the diameter of the coiled section on the IC so that it is wider and sits lower. Please keep the responses on the topic of which conversion is easiest. I would rather not have this become a debate over which is better as both have their own pros and cons, both of which I am fully aware of. I also realize that this could be easily rectified by always doing 10 gallon batches. My method of brewing is to mash for 10 gallons of beer and make 2 beers from the mash, sometimes partigyle if I want a big beer, sometimes one boil with split ferments, most times 2 separate 5 gallon batches. I have no need for 10 gallons of the same beer, nor 20 gallons of 2 beers.
I'd go with reworking the coil shorter and wider. It shouldn't be hard. A pipe bender will certainly keep you from crimping things.
It is an efficiency issue. I have 50' of copper coil, of which only 20-25' of it is being used to chill the wort, rendering it only 50% useful. I am wasting water and time as both are only utilized 50% of the time. It stands to reason that it will take me twice as long and use twice as much water to chill the same volume of wort to pitching temps as it would were the entire coil being used.
Would you uncoil the entire thing and then re-coil and bend the uprights, or would you begin working the coil open wider and shorter as you move through the coil?
That is not necessarily true. You lose 1/2 the surface area in contact with the wort, but the overall efficiency of the chiller is not halved, especially if you adjust your flow rate. You should be able to unbend the coils to make them wider, and you will end up with fewer coils, which will let it sit lower in the wort. But it wouldn't be critical to get all of the coils into the wort, as there are a lot of 30' chillers out there...including the one I currently use.
I would work open the coil wider and shorter as you move through. I did this with a 50ft 3/8 chiller so it was a little easier to work with but did work.
Not quite. Consider that, when fully submerged, water running through the 2nd half of the coil has been warmed while flowing through the first half. The delta-T has been dramatically reduced by the time the water reaches the second half. Maximum heat transfer (efficiency) occurs at the point where the water first enters the immersed part of the coil. It's all downhill from there. There are, no doubt, formulae that will quantify the effect (it's not my area of expertise), but I think it's safe to say that the hit to your efficiency will be waaaaay less than 50%.
I will retract my previous statement, since I did not consider the old vs. new and the drop in chill time resulting from it. But I will say that before you do anything you may want to test the time it takes to chill your wort without changing it and determine how much longer it will take you. That way you will know definitively if you need to make a change.
Good suggestion. I have a 5 gallon brew day on Saturday and no time to make any adjustments before then. I will test it then.
