Alternate cooling

[Yodaspike]

So we where wondering, what if you use a fridge system to cool you still or antifreez instead of water?

[Tummydoc]

Cool your still??? Or do you mean your condensers? Why would you complicate a simple process. You ideally want a temperature gradient in your condenser, too cold is associated with huffing from vapor collapse. I've also had a shotgun condenser develop a pinhole leak during a run (3 years after construction): started dripping "product" before my column was hot. Would not want antifreeze dripping in my product.

[NZChris]

The heat pump has to be large enough to be capable of extracting at least the same amount of heat that your element/fire puts into the boiler, so use that to calculate what size refrigeration unit you would need.

This isn't the first time someone has asked this question. Try using the Google search to find what has already been posted here.

[Yummyrum]

Tummy doc got good point . Condensers can leak . Iff'n you want to use Anti-freeze , only use Propylene Glycol ...it’s FDA approved food safe , used in Ice-cream etc .

Never use Ethylene Glycol cheap antifreeze used in car Radiators .. its more toxic than Methanol. .

Tanks of water are best and safest solution . 2000liter tank of water will let you strip and reflux 200 liters of wash easy . ... and its cheap and safe .

[bluefish_dist]

The problem with this is getting enough cooling. Most ac/cooling systems are far too small to pull out all the heat. 1 watt in is 3.4 btu out. I have tried ac unit blowing into a radiator, cooling water run over an ice maker. Problem was always not enough cooling.

[zach]

To cool with 5.5 kw input, a cooling system with 1.6 tons of refrigeration cooling system minimum should be used. Many window air conditioning units are rated at 2 tons (24,000 Btu/hr) . I've seen a number of home beer brewers convert these units to glycol chillers.

[jward]

FWIW, I use a small chest freezer like tank as the cooling source for a conical fermenter. I keep it half full of reverse osmosis water. I used a food grade glycol water mix once but it's spendy and bio fowled when I left it unchilled during disuse (aka vacation and break from brewing). Since I don't keep it below freezing the RO water works fine and is cheap to replace when I feel the need. It works well for that purpose. You do have some variables to play with like how much water you keep in the freezer and how cold you keep it. I have the smallest chest freezer size I have seen. It's footprint is about 2' x 2' and 30ish" tall. I run the glycol about 5F cooler than I want to ferment at to keep from over cooling. In the summer, my tap water is 82F leaving the wort cooled by an immersion chiller and tap water to hot for fermentation. The conical and chiller to sort that out before pitching yeast.

I had a few ideas on how to make a tank of really cold water work with a condenser. My first attempt would be limit the output so it's coming out pretty warm letting the condenser build the gradient and settle down. If the input is just too cold to settle down then I would probably try recirculating freezer water through an immersion chiller in a bucket of water where that warmer water is recirculated through the condenser.