If you only use the water to keep the fermentation temp down and the water is fully chilled you can probably get away with a lot. All that thermal mass holds a lot of heat/cool. I have developed some lazy habits like only chilling to 80-90F and pumping everything that will pump from the kettle into the conical and then dumping all the trub when it's cool enough to pitch.bwarbiany wrote: Interesting... I wonder if plain [RO] water in a fridge in a 6G bucket with a fan circulating in the fridge would be enough thermal mass to chill a 10 gal keg outside the fridge in SoCal summer temps... At least to ale ferment temperatures around 65 degrees? I suppose I could then even use softer bendable copper tubing like folks used to do with homemade immersion chillers...
I could even use a simple submersible pump... I'm not sure whether that works very well with glycol solutions.
John, you say you use a full chest freezer as your tank? I assume you have some sort of a temp controller on it so that it doesn't actually freeze all that RO water solid, right?
I used air cooling with a dorm fridge. It worked fine in the winter and struggled for ales in the summer. You have a lot of variables to play with. How hot is room you ferment in and how much do you insulate your fermentation keg, etc? As you work through what stuff is dominant in the system you may still have a few cheats. If you need to pre-chill the wort you could load some ice in the glycol tank(/bucket of water) for some extra cooling or if you find it's not keeping up.
I would avoid a bucket as plastic is probably too good of an insulator. I ran some tests using my jockey box as the cold source recirculating through the cold plate and the thin plastic bag that party ice comes in ruined the thermal conduction way more then I expected. Maybe use an aluminum pot?
I use some premium submersible pumps. They seemed fine with the glycol when I used it.
I use a BCS, but I used a Ranco before I got the full BCS built out and running.
