I'm not sure if this is the right place to come to ask for help on this topic or not, and I am already well aware of the complexity to the help I am asking others for on this topic, so let me back up and bring everyone up to speed on where I am at and why I need the help I do. Before I got a traumatic brain injury I was working on working out the last of some things on a DIY Chiller, but now I've got 95% of the entire system figured out and everything, but I am 100% clueless as to what the final pieces of the answer is to finish the system, and I am not in a place where I can do it anymore for myself or even ask anyone around me for help who would be able to understand it. The DIY Chiller is going to be a 50-foot copper 1/2-inch soft copper tube coiled inside of a refrigerator, want to know what it will look like look up "Wort Chiller" and "Triple Coil Immersion Wort Chiller" and you will see for yourself I have some options on how to do heat exchange and at how fast and how much of a rate. To give you an idea of why and where I am got this idea check this YouTube link:
HOW TO: DIY Aquarium chiller TUTORIAL
Unsure of if just leaving the copper coils in the air like that was the most effective way to cool, was considering putting them into a bucket like you would actually do with a Wort Chiller in the process of cooling beer, only I would use a product by "Cold Gel", the blue gel packs you can put in the freezer. They will sell the powder to make different cold gels yourself. I assumed this way the copper coils would be surrounded by something in a gel form which can hold its cold better than air or water and allow the fridge to keep up with chilling down the coolant passing through the inner copper coils. That is as far as I was in everything when I suddenly find myself here now with only my notes and former though processes which are written down to go by.
So the question becomes "Why not just buy a chiller and save myself the hassles?" because it was said nobody can really say for sure what size chiller I really need for what I am using it all for, so every company told me the following things:
- If the chiller is too small it won't be able to keep up and you won't be able to cool things properly
- If the chiller is too big, then it will cycle to many times in an hour and shut itself down until the set time passes and things won't cool properly
So how do you know what size chiller you need, well that depends on what your problem is, too cold or not cold enough... because if its cycling to often on/off you can use a Buffering Tank so the chiller doesn't cycle to often. If on the other hand your chiller is too small, you could go with a TES (Thermal Energy Storage) tank to store extra chilled coolant for when the system needs it at peak demand times when the chiller can't keep up. So again, what size chiller do I need? Chill King says that if you go with an "aquarium chiller" then figure at least double the size of what you think you need, and if you look at companies like Eco Plus they rate their chillers in GPH, and Chill King rates there's in BTU's... Chill King makes the smallest chiller a 1-ton chiller that sits outside on a concrete pad and has the pipes running inside to cool whatever, so that puts it into a perspective on the sheer "small size" of their smallest chiller. Everyone said the best way to find out was to put a chiller into place, run it and punch out some numbers for in and out coolant temps, etc... then they could further help me. Which lead me to come up with a DIY chiller as a cheap starting point, because I can build it for under $200 and perhaps it is all I'm going to need when the cheapest other chillers start at around $1,200.
That is as far as I got to finishing this when I got my brain injury, now I can't do basic things much less try to figure out the complex answers of if any of this stuff even works out, makes sense, etc... Someone can finish it for me, but first I need to know if the basic designs of this copper cooling coil being put into a cold gel really makes sense in the idea of working in this fashion, or was it just me goofing off with a random idea that didn't go anywhere? Any help would be appreciated, thank you.
HOW TO: DIY Aquarium chiller TUTORIAL
Unsure of if just leaving the copper coils in the air like that was the most effective way to cool, was considering putting them into a bucket like you would actually do with a Wort Chiller in the process of cooling beer, only I would use a product by "Cold Gel", the blue gel packs you can put in the freezer. They will sell the powder to make different cold gels yourself. I assumed this way the copper coils would be surrounded by something in a gel form which can hold its cold better than air or water and allow the fridge to keep up with chilling down the coolant passing through the inner copper coils. That is as far as I was in everything when I suddenly find myself here now with only my notes and former though processes which are written down to go by.
So the question becomes "Why not just buy a chiller and save myself the hassles?" because it was said nobody can really say for sure what size chiller I really need for what I am using it all for, so every company told me the following things:
- If the chiller is too small it won't be able to keep up and you won't be able to cool things properly
- If the chiller is too big, then it will cycle to many times in an hour and shut itself down until the set time passes and things won't cool properly
So how do you know what size chiller you need, well that depends on what your problem is, too cold or not cold enough... because if its cycling to often on/off you can use a Buffering Tank so the chiller doesn't cycle to often. If on the other hand your chiller is too small, you could go with a TES (Thermal Energy Storage) tank to store extra chilled coolant for when the system needs it at peak demand times when the chiller can't keep up. So again, what size chiller do I need? Chill King says that if you go with an "aquarium chiller" then figure at least double the size of what you think you need, and if you look at companies like Eco Plus they rate their chillers in GPH, and Chill King rates there's in BTU's... Chill King makes the smallest chiller a 1-ton chiller that sits outside on a concrete pad and has the pipes running inside to cool whatever, so that puts it into a perspective on the sheer "small size" of their smallest chiller. Everyone said the best way to find out was to put a chiller into place, run it and punch out some numbers for in and out coolant temps, etc... then they could further help me. Which lead me to come up with a DIY chiller as a cheap starting point, because I can build it for under $200 and perhaps it is all I'm going to need when the cheapest other chillers start at around $1,200.
That is as far as I got to finishing this when I got my brain injury, now I can't do basic things much less try to figure out the complex answers of if any of this stuff even works out, makes sense, etc... Someone can finish it for me, but first I need to know if the basic designs of this copper cooling coil being put into a cold gel really makes sense in the idea of working in this fashion, or was it just me goofing off with a random idea that didn't go anywhere? Any help would be appreciated, thank you.
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