Water savings from plate chiller to glycol unit

[Cambria Beer Co]

Is there a significant savings in waster water from using a small plate chiller to a more "professional" heat exchanger? Do the glycol units purely use glycol as the medium? We are looking to expand our operation from 3 bbl to 7 bbl and are working with the community service district on water saving measures. Currently we are using about 1/2 the water we estimated but to move into our new location we need to show some conservation measures and this is the area where we feel we can improve. We currently do not recycle our waste water.

thanks for entertaining the naive question

Aaron

[redwood_]

What I've seen so far is a two stage HX with water initially, then glycol completing the job to pitching temp.

[Cambria Beer Co]

What I've seen so far is a two stage HX with water initially, then glycol completing the job to pitching temp.

is there much saving of water from a plate chiller (ie homebrew version) to a more professional HX?

[dick murton]

I assume you are talking about chilling wort. If so, and assuming chiling the wort ot say 18 C, you should be able to produce hot water at 80 C +, which you can then use for mashing, sparging and cleaning with virtually no other heating or cold water addition (more required for mashing obviously). You should be able to get a hot water to wort ratio of about 1.1:1.0. If your cold water is rather warm, then simply chilling it a few degrees using a coil in the cold water tank works well. Then you don't need a two stage (separate water and separate glycol) chiller. You shouldn't have to waste too much. Decent lagging will keep it warm during production breaks, and some form of heating, say an immersion heater can be used to heat it at the end of a break just before mashing.

Never mind saving water, it saves a shed load of energy.

[redwood_]

Dick's number seems right on. Your HX'd water is a lot of wasted energy if you're dumping it. You took all the time to get it hot, you might as well keep it hot for your next brew!

Not sure if you save water or energy with a 2 stage hx. I guess it would on flow rate through the water side and how cold your chilling water is.

[Natrat]

What Dick mentioned is what we do. Our water temperature is highly variable from season to season, so we use a glycol-chilled cold liquor tank to keep our water around 40F. Then we use a standard single-pass HX to cool our wort and recapture the heated water in our hot liq for the next brew (we double- or triple- batch each day) which not only recaptures a significant amount of energy from our preceding brew, but allows us to use a relatively small hot liquor tank...which in turn is cheaper to heat initially.

One simple solution I have seen to this is to put a poly tank in a walk in cooler (usually under the evaporators where space is limited and forklifts do unwitting damage) and pipe it to the HX. Wouldn't work for us, as the walk in is so far from the brewhouse. I like having filtered cold liq on hand in the brewery, anyway.

Besides which, running a glycol stage in your HX can be rough on your chiller if it isn't sized for that specific heat load.

Good luck!

Nat