Anybody re-purposed a beer line chiller as a fermenter glycol chiller?

[hoppyscotty]

My garage is getting too cluttered with fridges! I need a glycol chiller, but too stingy to buy one at full price, especially since they are probably way too capable for my needs. I notice that glycol beer line chillers are quite cheap on the usual sites, about £200 to £300, and on the basis I'm only looking to run a couple of fermenters, maybe 3 at a time, all staggered so unlikely to be all cold crashing at the same time, then made me wonder if it would be possible to re-purpose a beer line chiller? I'm thinking all it would need is a small pump, an Inkbird or something to control the pump and you're good to go. Have I missed a trick? Is there a reason why Homebrewers are not already jumping all over these?

Thanks.

 

[CD]

Have I missed a trick? Is there a reason why Homebrewers are not already jumping all over these?

No you haven’t, I use two – one to control the temperature of my Fermenting Vessel, and another to control my Beer Store. Chillers are Maxi units, controllers similar to an Inkbird, and pumps are central heating units.

I had a bit of a problem with the stirrer motors, which drive a model ship propeller in the water tank, as they ran 24/7, but got over it by fitting external thermostats to switch everything off when the water gets down to a set temperature.

I described my temperature control system in detail in a thread titled ‘CD’s Brewery’, which for some reason you will only find by searching for ‘impulse purchase kitchen boilers’.

 

[hoppyscotty]

Brill, sounds promising. I'm looking at a Maxi 210 chiller water with recalculation. Do they run water? can I put in glycol in the water to run at lower temps and run multiple fermenters?

I'll swing by your 'impulse purchase kitchen boilers' thread and have a read.

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

I use a Maxi 310 to control the temperature of my entire brew-shed and separately my fermentation cabinet.

You can use water down to just below zero degrees. Adding monopropylene glycol you can go much lower.

 

[hoppyscotty]

I've checked out the 'impulse purchase kitchen boiler' thread but it doesn't seem to have much by way of detail on how to hook up one of these chillers to chill a fermenter.

What exactly would I need? Are the pumps built into the units or would I need an external pump?

Are they just a receptacle to hold water and chill it and nothing more?

is the thermostatic control that would turn a pump on and off as the fermenter demanded cooling built into the unit or would I need to modify it to introduce temperature control device to turn a pump on and off?

If it is just a vat of water that is chilled then I can see it being quite simple to just hook up a pump controlled by an inkbird to start pumping cold water when demanded and shut it off when the desired temperature has been reached. But if it has the pump and thermostatic control built in then it would require some modification I would imagine.

Can anyone share any more details on what would be required? I think I've established I need a recirculation model of a beer chiller.

Thanks.

 

[CD]

The chillers are basically just a deep freeze compressor unit whose copper cooling coils are in a plastic tank of water. Also in the tank are one or more coils of stainless steel tubing through which the beverages to be cooled run. An electric fan blows air through a small radiator to cool the hot side of the deep freeze unit, and a separate synchronous motor on top of the water tank works a stirrer to keep the water in motion. Some versions incorporate a small pump on the stirrer shaft for pumping cool water through water-jacketed beer engines. An adjustable internal thermostat controls the freezer unit, it’s sensor being against the beverage inlet pipe, but as stated earlier the stirrer runs all the time.

If you are wanting to use one to cool another vessel, like a FV, you need an external pump, and those made for small-bore central heating systems are ideal, and dirt cheap on e-Bay. You will need a water jacket or cooling coil around or in your FV, and an Inkbird or similar controller to turn the pump on and off. I hope this answers your questions.

 

[hoppyscotty]

Brill, thanks. Sounds pretty good and no need for modification of the actual unit needed...just hook up the pump and ink bird and it can draw cold water from the unit.

Just one further question, if I was to replace the water with glycol, then I guess I could disconnect the water stirrer pump? I assume that is only there to prevent the water from freezing but with glycol that shouldn't be an issue so no need for the stirrer pump and it's constant electrical draw?

 

[peebee]

I use a 310 to cool kegs and a generic cooler (like a 210/310 but better it seems) to cool fermenters.

They are "just a receptacle to hold water and chill it" with a very underpowered pump to pump the water about. The "agitator" is just a propeller fixed to the pump to stir up the water bath a bit. The bath contains stainless (?) steel coils (2, occasionally 4) to cool "product" (beer!) running through them.

I'm currently upgrading my coolers; the very "retro" thermostat kept things at about 3C, but with a bit of fiddling (a screw) I got it down to 0.5C. Doesn't seem to want to go lower so I've not added any glycol. I'm replacing the thermostat with an Inkbird-like one (be warned; the free-standing Inkbird ITC308 has a common hard-to-detect-fault that might not do the old compressors in these coolers any good if trying to keep to tight temperature bands <3or4C). I'm also/have added more useful pumps which have the advantage of being run separately and on demand (controlled by the fermenter's thermostat) - The Cooler needn't then be on so much the time (they are noisy!).

 

[peebee]

Brill, thanks. Sounds pretty good and no need for modification of the actual unit needed...just hook up the pump and ink bird and it can draw cold water from the unit.

Just one further question, if I was to replace the water with glycol, then I guess I could disconnect the water stirrer pump? I assume that is only there to prevent the water from freezing but with glycol that shouldn't be an issue so no need for the stirrer pump and it's constant electrical draw?

You don't need to modify the cooler unit, in fact the naff pump is good to "prime" the extra decent external pumps. But if you want to use glycol the inbuilt thermostat will need adjusting/replacing.

You need agitation to help keep the water bath temperature constant.

 

[CD]

so no need for the stirrer pump and it's constant electrical draw?

I have anti-freeze added to the tank as my brewery can get below freezing in winter. You need the stirrer to transfer the low temperature between the coils. I added an external thermostat, with its sensor in the water tank, to shut the lot down when the water is cold enough, as the stirrer made a slurping noise all the time, and its bearings gave trouble.

 

[CD]

I think Peebee and I are using these units differently. I circulate water through the ‘product’ (they are used for fizzy drinks too) coils, while he circulates the water that is in the internal tank. Which goes to show that there is more than one way to skin a cat!

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

I also use the coolant from the glycol bath. If you buy a unit with recirculation there are pipes provided and coolant is pumped out using the internal pump (if you aren’t using this feature you need to cap the pipes or loop from “out” to “in” or when you switch on the unit you’ll empty the coolant onto your floor).

This is the front of my chiller, you see the recirculation pipes (upward pointing) and the product pipes below.

 

[hoppyscotty]

Great info, thanks. Think I prefer the idea of the recirculation option. If I've understood correctly with this the recirc loop is completely independent from the 'water bath' part?

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

No, the chiller pumps the chilled water/glycol from the water bath out through one of the recirculation ports and you return it via the other one.

The chiller essentially comprises three parts; there’s a refrigeration part which is used to chill the water bath, there’s the water bath which is used for cooling and is fed out of the recirculation port (for return by you), and there is a set of product coils that start and end outside the unit but the coil itself is submerged in the water bath. Here’s a picture of one opened up, this one doesn’t have the recirculation feature but you can see the refrigeration part to the left and the coils in the water bath on the right.

The outer ring of pipe is part of the refrigeration circuit and used to chill the water bath. The inner coils are the product coils, the two ends of each protrude through the front for you to connect your keg/tap. The hole in the centre of the coils is where the pump sits if you have the recirculation feature.

This is a picture inside mine. The water bath has it’s cover on and you can see the stirrer/pump on top.

 

[CD]

Great pictures which show all there is to the units. As I understand it, the recirculation ports are just to keep the cylinders of beer engines cool, a refinement to prevent the first beer pulled up at each drinking session being warm.

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

Great pictures which show all there is to the units. As I understand it, the recirculation ports are just to keep the cylinders of beer engines cool, a refinement to prevent the first beer pulled up at each drinking session being warm.

That’s right, and to keep the beer sitting in the pipe/python cold for kegged beer.

…and to create those displays of ice on the beer font/tower you see in some pubs.

 

[aolcot]

Ive a Maxi 310 using plain old water and ive modified it to have a mains plug direct on the recirculation pump and i just plug that into my inkbird to control when i want the cooling i.e the recirculation to be active.
Works well enough and in a garage setup i can crash down to about 2degrees on a spring day with my setup. Prob a touch colder in the winter months.

 

[itry]

Yes i have. Im working on building it in to craftbrewpi3 at the moment. Aswell as redesigning the fermenter part of my brewery.

 

[CD]

My original attempt at controlling the temperature of my FV involved an Ice Bank the size of a large wardrobe used to cool milk in a Dairy. This was replaced by the shelf cooler I acquired when Hall’s Brewery closed, which just had a single 10mm dia. coil for Lager, or whatever. When that eventually died I bought a Maxi unit, and was nonplussed to find it had three smaller product coils, so had a devil of a job joining these up as you can see here.

This is the other side of the wall, showing the central heating type pump, and the final shot is of the external thermostat fitted to switch the whole unit off and stop the stirrer going all the time. The capillary tubing to the sensor sneaks in under the handle, the bulb itself being in the water tank. Ignore the digital display, it’s on my CD player!

 

[tigertim]

I've just acquired a shelf cooler as above and I plan to use it both for chilling beer through the stainless steel product lines, and also for keeping my FV down to temperature (there's enough room to drop the submersible pump which comes with the SS Brewbucket FTSS straight into the water bath, which makes things really easy).

However, as the unit is of unknown origin, I wondered if there were any best practices for cleaning the stainless steel product coils, the inside of which it's impossible to see! I have no idea what horrors of old soda syrup or beer there might be lurking in there, so I'm not convinced running a bit of Starsan through will be enough.