Plate chillers

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Shaun-O

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So I was thinking about linking two plate chillers together in series. Each with an independent water supply for cooling larger batches. Has anyone done something similar with good results?
 
hi, and welcome,

what size chillers ? and what volume of brew do you need to chill? Usually a single chiller circa 125-150kw will suit most home/micro breweries.

smaller chillers may present too small a gap between the plates to ensure a clear passage for a cold break laden liquor resulting in blockages at worst or residual break and hop debris,trub resisting a backflush clean. Requiring lots of post kettle filtering.
 
Was wanting to chill approx 150 litres in one pass. Looking for recommendations for a suitable chiller
 
Any counter flow chiller will cool it in 1 pass just the flow rate you can chill at and therefore time will vary. I used to own a 1bbl brewery chilling around 180L which the plate chiller it came with did in about 1 hour 10 mins. I just had a look to find the specs on it but all I could find was it cost £150. It could call it much quicker but it gets quickly clogged with hop matter and quickly looses efficiency, its also a nightmare to clean. As an alternative I made a counter flow chiller fron 15M of 15mm pipe running inside 24mm pipe which could cool the same batch in around 50 mins but was huge, another advantage is you could keep extending it to cool quicker if you want. As for using 2 of either chillers with 2 water supplies (assuming they don't take any pressure away from each other) would speed it up hugely but be very water inefficient while it you could push both water supplies through both it would work better in all respects but its unlikely you can.
 
Thanks guys. Tempted now to build the counterflow chiller as Simon did. But how to keep it compact. Didn't fancy the idea of cleaning the plate chillers. Anyway... Lol
 
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compact straight tube cfc's do require more fittings to terminate end of runs, the longer the tubes you can accommodate the cheaper the build will come in..

the above is 14x 500mm lengths of 0.25mm thick 10mm ss tube and can chill (autumn/winter) @ 3+ Litres per minute.

But with 28x jubilee clips to tighten and 28 x bungs to seal for the water system, its best used outside..
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