another daft idea...

[Hogarth]

I was about to suggest a gun cleaning kit.

[Fil]

I was about to suggest a gun cleaning kit.

cheers i saw them on ebay - brass brush tufts, and xpensive.. the nylon brush will clean both the silicone and SS tube ok

Next the large fermentor , and then .... A BIG VOLUME BREWDAY!!!

[Belter]

You're going to beat me Phil!!!

[Fil]

And mounted for use,
beer in and water out at the top, water in and beer out at the bottom, so simply mounting above the FV in use should encourage all the beer to drain thru at the end.

just a wee bit more tube to connect and feed. sorted out the leaky valve it was just unscrewed, phew



Could cold break be filtered before entering the fv? if so what and how? i currently fill my fv thru a nylon seive primarily to oxygenate and that dosent stop the inches of trub settling. post chilling dry hop filtering?? or am i off on another wild un?

[Aleman]

I love it!

I originally played with a pipe chiller 15 years ago (15mm copper in 22mm) but at only 1 length at 2m long . . . Managed to get to 40C with the one length

If it had been me, I would have gone for 2m or 3m lengths though, and just because I love over complicating things cooled each length separately. If it is a space issue you can wall mount it vertically, which makes filling with coolant easy.

Even though I have a BMF Plate Chiller I may well build one of these for cooling 'coolant' during summer.

[Fil]

Longer tubes would indeed be a lot cheaper to build, it was the 24X of everything that pushed up costs, - still came in at less than the US copper import option tho.. not by much however

the 'cheap' SS tubes were the limiting factor.. experiment #1 which was a total flop was to join the 500mm lengths of SS with silicone tube and shove that down the pvc tube, But lets just say it wasnt a winner

Its been named the 'flux capacitor' by my pal who is convinced i will leave a crater as a legacy..

[john luc]

Loved the design. I use a counterflow chiller with a 100mm seamless stainless steel pipe coiled inside a 25mm ID clear pvc pipe. Often considered that if you were running a commercial set up your design would be the way to go but I would add a second one. The first one to take the initial heat out of the wort and save it in the next lot of brewing water and the second run through a chilled glycol system to drive the wort down to a lager temp. That,s if you are brewing a Lager of course .

[Fil]

I looked at doing similar but was limited initially by the lengths of ss tube i could source and get delivered for a reasonable price.. I had some of the short tubes and picked up 5m more on ebay for £20, i was looking at £60+ for bes thicker walled tube hmm and i wasnt thinking about the cumulative costs of 28 (in the end) end terminations.. and once i had started......

one 'feature' of using bungs to terminate the ends may turn out that it needs a re-seal b4 use each time? and squashed up as it is now gaining a good grip may problematic..

How practical it would be is dubious but theoretically just by undoing 2 jubilee clips an end H can be removed and replaced with 2 in/out feeds splitting the chiller into smaller units anywhere along its length. Either to increase efficiency with 2 cold feeds, even differently sourced cold feeds..

I will be testing it again soon in its new configuration, ive had to order more thicker walled silicone as i woujld prefer to feed it thru that than the thin walled stuff which i can then use to attach floats in cornys..

while it may not be a complete finished project its still got wheels

[EccentricDyslexic]

Smashin job Fil! Looks the part too! That 2m pipe cleaner looks handy, recon it work good on my 3m cfc. Be interesting to see if anything is lurking in there that hasn't been nuked by pbw, bleach, wizzoxy or caustic:-)

Steve

[Hogarth]

Fil, do you plan on removing the silicon tubes for cleaning after every use? If not, I'm wondering if there might be an issue with wort seeping underneath the tubes where they fit onto the stainless pipes, and not being flushed out when you circulate cleaner. Could be a bit of a bacteria 'nook'?

I'm worrying about these things because I'm trying to decide whether to build one of these -- I've actually started buying parts -- or to go for an enormous IC instead.

[Fil]

I intend to pull the silicone off between uses so i know i have a dry surface area inside between brews. currently some ends are a bit chewed due to being used as a cutting tool for bungs and having a tool used to push against them.. so im begging some brake pipe tools to form the ends into a nice clean circle and slightly form em into the opposite of a flute as not to rip against the silicone tube wall as some currently do.. work in progress.... yes i know more tube.. im not using the chewd ended ones and if i cant shorten em ... hopefully my last order of tube will be the last

[Fil]

a materials feature has surfaced.. the ss tubes it appears have a ?swaige? due to cutting, this is eating the silicone with each connection, scratching the inner surface and weakening the tube so its prone to split.

Solution.. strip down and wet n dry smooth each end patiently the tubes are too thin to machine apparently?? spoke to a real engineer about it..
And to use a wider inner bore tube .. and perhaps employ clips rather than rely on friction to maintain the seal. so a bit further away from finished just yet,,

perhaps the seller of the tube i just bought will accept it back as part exchange ?? ho hum.

so if thinking of doing anything similar wet n dry the ?swaige? off the tubes first, it should also make the core-ing of bungs easier ???Now i get told that! 28 bungs later!!!!!

[Fil]

Its been used and VERY sucessfully see the pics of the brewday in this thread viewtopic.php?f=24&t=62695&p=659373#p659373

I cleaned it out with the pipe cleaning brush and sanitised it by recirculating the boiling wort durring flame out, the beer transport tube connections of silicone tube held tight without a drop of beer leaking and no air bubbles were in the tube indicating a leak

and as soon as i turned on the water supply and stuck a thermometer in the boiler return the thermometer was still dropping when it hit 22C and both elements wer still maintaining a full boil so its a easy single pass int the FV in one Score Me 1

just to balance things out my experimental cheapo Perspex FB wasnt such a success .. ended up a wee bit warped.

oh well

[EccentricDyslexic]

Good news! It's great to know u can clean inside stuff!

Steve