Maxi 210 chiller question

[John Price]

I've just acquired a Maxi 210 chiller unit and I've a couple of questions.

I'm,hopefully,going to be using the it to pump chilled water through an immersion coil to crash cool my wort.Does anyone use a Maxi for this?And are there any pros and cons?

Doe anyone use biocide in the tank or do they empty the tank at every usage bearing in mind it will only be used on Brewdays?

Thank you.

JP.

[Blackaddler]

The maximum temperature you can pass through the Maxi is 40C, otherwise you can damage the chiller.

You'll find that it's not very effective anyway, as the ice bath will quickly melt if you pass hot wort through the coil.

I pump cold water from a water butt through my immersion coil. In Winter I don't use the chiller, but in Summer, once I've got the wort temperature down to about 30C, I connect up to the chiller recirc to lower it to ~20C.

I use rain water in my chillers, and rarely empty them, just top up, mostly.

Documentation for Maxi chillers in this post

[John Price]

Thank you very much for the documentation.

Right,I get that bit as I've now had a look inside and with your spec sheet I can see what's involved.

A water butt is not an option so Plan B was to use the chiller on one side of a heat exchanger and the immersion coil on the other and by using two pumps and playing with the flowrates I might be able to speed the cooling up a bit.

I already have two throttlable pumps and a heat exchanger in my current set up.

I might just suck it and see.

JP.

[Blackaddler]

If I didn't pump water from the water butts, I would just use mains water to do most of the cooling.

[steambrew]

I found using a chiller to cool wart took to long I use tap water and use the chiller to cool my beer and pumps via a python

[Kev888]

Theres a great deal of heat in a batch of near-boiling wort- initially the water leaving the IC is 'very' hot even with my cold tap turned on full bore. So if you limited the rate of heat transfer to observe the max temperature of a beer cooler, which would then inefficiently cool it and try to dump both it and the heat made by the cooler itself into the low heat-capacity air, I'm sure it would work but it seems like a rather complex and inefficient process to me.

However as the wort cools, then the differential between it and the cooling water drops, heat transfer slows and and a tap water based IC becomes far less efficient - in summer the last several degrees can take ages to reach and/or use a lot of cooling water. At that stage the beer cooler would be much more beneficial IMO.

If you were going to do that you could consider setting up the cooler as a fermentation temperature controller, and transferring wort to the fermenter several degrees higher than you want to pitch at. Lots of people use fridges but a fair few also use beer coolers to regulate fermenting temperature - they are a more direct way of controlling/adjusting wort temperature and crash cooling the beer after fermentation, though also a bit more expensive and complex to set up than a used fridge.

Cheers
kev

[Fil]

there is a brewer who uses a big F-off chiller to chill off the boil wort down to pitching temp by using the python pump to flow thru hose coiled around the outside of a big blue barrel fermentor, but its not a shelf model, its one of those big ones on wheels, the latent cold stored in a maxi shelf chiller in its ice wall after a few hours chilling isnt going to balance out the latent heat in 23l of off the boil wort, i guess you could do the math to prove it, but i think it would be akin to dropping an ice cube or 2 into a mug of just made instant black coffee.

as a fv chiller maintaining a stable cool temp once pitching temp has been hit however is well within the capacity of a maxi 210 as kev888 says.. ebay has on occasion the square product coils from the larger chest on wheels chillers for circa £15-20, and they make ideal cooling coils to drop into the FV

[Kev888]

Thats a point, I've got one of those chest-on-wheels type coolers to flog off at some point - cost me hundreds of pounds and I've now got no idea why i thought the beast would be appropriate for my needs. I wonder if theres still time to change my reply into a sales-pitch instead

Cheers
kev

[John Price]

Thanks Everyone,lots of food for thought.

I take the point about the amount of heat.

I've re-visited my brewery layout and with a bit of modification to a wall I can locate a 1000l ibc right outside the window and use that as a heatsink for the immersion coil.

I think I'll investigate the possibility of using the chiller as an FV cooler during the warmer months.

Thank you all and Merry Christmas.

JP.