Chest freezer chiller

[Renzo]

Hi Everybody. First time poster. Great forum.

I'm Interested if anybody uses this technique? i.e fill a lined (with SS) chest freezer with glycol solution to cool fermenter jackets.

Also can anyone tell me if there is a simple formula for calculating the cold water volume required for chilling wort e.g. 1 litre at 5C needed to chill 1 litre of boiling wort, or 1.5 litres at 10C to chill boiling wort?

[liammckenna]

Take a lookhere

And here on probrewer.com

As far as using a retrofitted freezer, I guess it depends on your heat load which tends to be massive with active fermentors and crash cooling of same.

I guess the biggest concern of your idea would be the ability of the freezer to dump heat without further design changes.

Pax.

[BeersmithMT]

Renzo,

I did build a glycol chest freezer system many years ago to chill just 7 bbls of fermentation. We simply cut a supply & return ports into the chest freezer (missing the refrigeration lines of course) and installed a recirculation pump. No need to line the freezer with SS, we sealed the seams with plumber's epoxy putty.

Now the not so good news....Chest freezers have small compressors and will not cool down the contents quickly - they are made to maintain cold temps, not repeatedly cool their contents down. Our 27 cf freezer did an adequate job of keeping the fermentation cool, but a poor job of crashing the fermenter. It would take a couple of days to drop the temp down to 38F, and a another day+ to recover. You would be way better off to use a commercial glycol chiller unless you were dealing with a very small fermentation load.

[jerrymcmahan]

Glycol in chest freezer

It can't handle it; look at the size of the compressor on even the smallest commercial glycol chiller compared to what a 15cf freezer has. The advice to seek a real chiller is the way to go.

If you can get several (4-6) chest freezers for less $$$ than a chiller and run the beer/wort through them in series, that might work (no, I haven't done the math). However, this would work the freezers pretty hard and they might not last too long. Not to mention all the space they would take up.

[Renzo]

Cheers. That all makes sense. Thanks for the links to check out as well.