Counterflow and Plate Chillers

[BrewStew]

I'm considering investing in one of the above because i dont fancy waiting for an IC to chill nearly 20 gallons of wort.

My question is though, do any of you guys recirculate the cooled wort back into the boiler for a sort of "double cooling" effect... where the cold wort cools the hot wort down, presumably making chilling times shorter, and thus reducing the amount of water used for chilling. would this also filter the wort better from going through the hop bed a couple of times?

 

[Kingfisher]

Mine's all done by gravity via a plate cooler into the FV, it does 23l in around 25mins. I'm not metered. Good point about putting it back through the wort though. I'll be interested in the answers.

 

[Aleman]

Steve Flack does and gets some great chilling times. I've never got close to the times I get from using a IC with hot wort recirculation using my CFC, and my plate chiller is not that good either.

From both the PC and the CFC I would get down to about 35C but that was running the coolant at full bore . . . it could be that I was running the wort too quickly though.

I find using my 10m IC I can chill 50L of wort to 20C is in about 30 minutes using the pumped recirculation method . . . . It's debatable if I am going to change . . . I may try my CFC again when I get the new pump setup.

 

[Vossy1]

I've done the re-circing thing. Initial cooling is great but once down to 30deg c it's a right royal PITA..and takes forever.

I gave up on my plate chiller as I found it to be too user unfriendly. I reckon the PC's that can be taken apart will be great...I wish I had one...but the sealed units are bobbins.
Mine started to rust between uses and the notion of drying it out in my oven just killed it for me.

I find that my Morebeer pump pulls wort through the cfc, to the fv, at a rate of 2ltr/min.
I've been thinking of trying to by pass the hop strainer and pull the wort from above it to see if the flow rate through the cfc is improved, possibly pulling the wort out at the top of the copper, where it's hottest.
It may even be possible to shorten the cfc and get better cooling due to the higher flow rate of the wort :hmm:
I haven't got round to tyring it yet.