| Tubing wall thickness .035"
|
| Qty | Description | Amt |
|---|---|---|
| 5/8" O.D. Copper Soft Tubing | $29.50 | |
| 3/8" O.D. Copper Soft Tubing | $19.50 | |
| 1/2" x Garden Hose adapter
2-Male 2-Female |
$ 3.96 | |
| 1/2" Copper Tee | $ 2.20 | |
| 1/2" x 1/4" Copper Reducer | $ 2.36 |
*Note the 1/2" and 1/4" sizes are on the receipt, however I do not know if the receipt is correct. The 1/2" sized parts will need to fit on the outside of the the 5/8" tubing and the 1/4" on the outside of the 3/8" tubing as well.
- Cut four lengths of 5/8" copper tubing 3 inches long.
- Sweat solder two of the four 5/8" pieces of copper tubing into
each tee, making sure to leave one of the straight through sides of
the tee open.
- Sweat solder a garden hose adapter onto the middle piece of each
tee.
- Unroll the 5/8" tubing on a long flat surface, I used my
driveway.
- Carefully unroll the 3/8" tubing a little bit and push it
through the inside of the 5/8" tubing. Keep unrolling a little of
the 3/8" tubing and pushing the whole length through the 5/8"
tubing. If necessary apply some oil periodically to the outside of
the 3/8" tubing to help it slide through the 5/8" tubing.
- Carefully roll up the 5/8" tubing with the 3/8" tubing still
inside the 5/8". I used a form with a diameter of 16" to roll the
combined tubing around. Make sure the form is very sturdy, the
double tubing is rather difficult to coil back up.
- With the tubing in a coil, make sure there is at least 8 inches
of 3/8" tubing sticking out of each end of the 5/8" tubing. If
there is less on either end use a pipe cutter to remove some 5/8"
tubing from around the 3/8" until there is 8". Make sure there is
enough room on each end to fit a tee, the reducer, and still leave
a few inches of 3/8" tubing exposed to slide some plastic siphon
tubing over.
- Sweat solder a tee on each end of the 5/8" tubing.
- Using a small round file remove the tabs on the inside of the
reducing sleeve so that the 3/8" tubing can slide completely through
the reducer.
- Sweat solder the reducing sleeve onto the 5/8" tube coming out
of the tee and then sweat solder the 3/8" coil in the other end of
the reducer.
- Pressure test the outer water jacket by attaching a short length of hose to the male adapter on the chiller. To this short length of hose attach a hose nozzle which is partially opened. Connect the female garden hose adapter of the chiller to a garden hose which can supply cold water at approximately 30 psi. Slowly increase the flow of water flowing through the system till the flow is wide open. Slowly restrict the nozzle which was partially open after water starts to flow out of it. Start checking all soldered joints for small water leaks and fix if any found. Prior to use as a chiller, if you used oil to help slide the smaller tube into the larger, apply some dish soap to the supply side of the water jacket and flush this though the jacket. This cleaning step will remove any oil that remains in the jacket and help the water in the jacket cool more effectively. You will be surprised by the amount of cooling water that can flow through this system.
- When using the counter concurrent chiller directly with boiling
wort, make a racking cane out of 3/8" soft copper tubing. I melted my
plastic racking cane with the hot wort.
- Use plastic tubing with reinforcement woven into the tubing as the
hot wort will otherwise potentially rupture the plastic tubing.
- Use the appropriate sized clams to hold the plastic tubing on to
the 3/8" copper tubing. I used 5/8" spring hose clamps (like those
on windshield washer tubing in automobiles.) My are from an auto
parts store and cost $3.00 for 6.
- To sanitize the chiller have all tubing in place and hook the
plastic tubing to the top of a pressure cooker, make sure air can
freely flow through the plastic tubing and 3/8" copper tubing. I
use a pressure cooker to send steam through the tubing until steam
comes out the far end for at least 10 minutes.
- Make sure when you hook up the chiller to the garden hoses that you place the cold water in (female garden hose adapter) on the same side of the chiller as the cool wort will flow out. Hook a separate garden hose to the male hose adapter and run the other end of the hose to a drain, or other area for hot water drainage.
- My first version of the chiller was 50 feet in length. I was not able to get warm enough wort coming out of the chiller. I had the water just trickling through the cooling jacket and my wort was coming out at 55 degrees Fahrenheit. It was possible to turn the water up to full flow and really get a lot of water flowing through. The system was too efficient to control the wort temperature coming out via the cooling water flow. It was kind of funny adding boiling water into my primary just to get the temperature up into ale fermenting range. An added advantage to shortening the length of copper tubing to 25' was a production cost of around $30 instead of the $56.
- It was nicer to have a quicker flow of wort through the siphon. Shortening the chiller to 25 feet in length really improved the flow rate throught the chiller. In the 50 foot version it used to take between 15 and 20 minutes to cool 5 gallons of hot wort. The 25 foot version does this in approximately 10 minutes.
- Another improvement to the chiller's design was to install a
valve on the output side to the chiller so that you
don't have to walk to the hose faucet to make adjustments. In
conjunction with this valve addition the garden hose adapters
were placed in a parallel orientation with the wort line.
This was accomplished using 2 - 1/2" copper 90 degree bends.
- The addition of plastic binding strips should help the
effeciency of the chiller, reduce connection errors, and
solidify the unit. A red strip was placed on the hot end and
a blue was placed on the cold end. Black and White were used
to secure the coil with smaller strips used to keep gaps in
the coil. These gaps should help prevent heat transfer to
nearby coils.
- This system was designed as copper only because I was under the assumption that copper/copper would be a better heat conduit that just copper/water. I assumed that when the copper tubing was coiled up the 3/8" copper would touch the outer walls of the 5/8" copper and would provide better heat transfer. If you choose to substitute a garden hose for the 5/8" copper tubing to reduce cost, do not steam sanitize the chiller as I believe it would melt the garden hose. When steam sanitizing the chiller as descriped above, the outer copper coils get very very hot, be carefull.
-
Below is an efficiency table based on reference to 3/8 inch
inner tubing and a 25 foot chiller length. An example from the
following table: a 1/2 inch inner tubing 16 foot chiller has a
cooling efficiency of .46 of the 3/8, 25 chiller. If you wish
to maintain the same cooling efficiency of a 3/8 chiller using
1/2 tubing you need to increase the length of the 1/2 tubing
by 1.4 times the length of the 3/8 inch tubing. The benefit
to using a 1/2 inch chiller as opposed to a 3/8 chiller is
that the flow rate is almost doubled. For a 1/2 inch chiller
I would use a 7/8 inch outer jacket which would have a volume
1.1 times the wort line volume. A 1 1/8 jacket could be used
instead providing a 1.9 times increase in cooling jacket
volume, but I don't think this will be of benefit. My theory
is, as jacket volume decreases the cooling fluid flow rate
increases negating the effect of the reduced jacket volume.
Relative Chiller Efficiencies Chiller Length Wort Line
Diameter25 16 12 10 3/8 1 .64 .48 .40 1/2 .71 .46 .34 .29
