Building your own wort chiller

Rather than shelling out $30-$60 for a wort chiller I decided to make one myself, just like many other homebrewers out there. I had some questions about making one, so when I built mine I took pictures along the way to help out others in making there own chillers.

NOTE: The price of copper has gone up considerably since I made my own chiller. You can still find tubing at a decent price, but it is getting much harder.

A quick note: you can click on any image on this page to see a much larger version.

First of all, I went to Lowes (http://www.lowes.com) and bought 50ft of 1/4 inch OD (outer diameter) refrigerator tubing for $10.78.

Why this size? Well, the smaller tubing allows for a better surface/volume ratio. However, the smaller size means a slower flow rate of water through the chiller. A larger tubing such as 1/2 inch offers a higher flow (more cool water can get in and out of the chiller) but the surface/volume ratio is reduced. Lower surface/volume means less transfer of heat between the hot wort and the cool water in the chiller.
There are other tubing sizes out there, 3/8 offers the best compromise between 1/4 and 1/2, and was what I wanted, but the store I visited was out. Get whichever you want, the price difference is about $5.

This tubing is very soft and can kink very easily. A kink in the copper probably means you'll have to chop up the chiller or buy more tubing, so invest in a tube bender. The bender is basically just a long spring that you slip over the copper to keep it from getting kinks. Unfortunately for me, Lowes only has the "Professional" tube bending kit for close to $8. This kit has four different sizes of benders, and I only needed the 1/4 inch. Oh well, I bought it.

You can eyeball your chiller and bend it freestyle, but I'm not that good so I used a 3-gallon keg. The 3-gallon keg was a little fatter than my 5-gallons, and I thought a little wider chiller would work better in my converted keg kettle.

I started by sliding the bender onto the tubing.

Using the bender, I slowly wrapped the tubing around the keg, pressing it into shape and keeping the coils as uniform as possible.

I continued all the way around the keg, until I had about 3 feet of tubing left to bend. I created a 90-degree bend at the bottom and threaded the remaining tubing up in and out of the coils to help create a stronger chiller.

You'll need to attach you chiller to your water source, and my source is a garden hose (more on water sources later) so I'll need an adapter. At first I bought a nylon hose-to-1/4 tubing adapter, but later I figured out that a washing machine hose would be perfect. I happened to have one laying around, so I chopped off one end and clamped it to my chiller's intake. Less mess than making your own adapter, but they cost $5, so you might make your own adapter for less.

Here's a pic of the semi-completed chiller:

Here is the completed chiller in action:

It cooled a 5-gallon batch to 75 degrees on a warm day in 24 minutes. My hose was in the sun and had hot water running through it for a little while.
I also learned not to touch the exit piping. Ouch!

This is a work in progress, I'm waiting on my keg to come back from being cut. Once the keg kettle is back, I'll bend the top of the chiller to fit it and attach a drainage hose. I'm thinking about buying a few feet of copper tubing and creating a pre-chiller to cool my water a little more before it enters the wort chiller. My tap water runs about 80 degrees during the summer here in Arkansas, so I need to do something. If I build a smaller version of the wort chiller, put it in a cooler full of ice water, run water through it and into my larger chiller, it should cool my wort faster. That will have to wait until everything else is completed. More pictures to come soon!

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