• Equipment

  Questions About Chiller Sizing

  Posted by hedgebird on June 5, 2024 at 8:04 pm

  Just looking to run this math past everyone and make sure nothing looks way off.

  300 gallon mashtun crashing 70 degrees is 174,930 btu or 7,289 btu/hr.

  300 gallon carb tank crashing 70 degrees is another 174,930 btu or 7,289 btu/hr.

  3×300 gallon ferments is about 118,125 btu or 1,641 btu/hr over the three day ferment.

  Total daily BTU load would be 389,232 or 16,218/hr.

  If I have a 5hp chiller that puts out 30,000 btu/hr, thats provides 720,000 BTU cooling per day.  Presumably this would be plenty to cover loses from ineficiency, etc?

  Additional Notes:

  – no stills are connected to the chiller

  – have a 1,000 gallon cold liquor tank for crash cooling the mash..

  -spreadsheet math below

   

  Thanks for any feedback!

   

  Pull Down/Crash Cooling Load
  Tank Size and Weight			Crash Cooling			BTU Required / Per Hour			Notes
  Tank Size	lb	Total LB	Strt Temp	End Temp	Temp Dif.	Total BTU		BTU/hr
  950	8.33	7,914	77	54	23	182,011		7,584	1,000 gallon cold liquor tank
  300	8.33	2,499	155	85	70	174,930		7,289	300 gallon mash-tun
  300	8.33	2,499	100	30	70	174,930		7,289	Carbination tank
  Fermentation Load
  Tank Size and Brix			Fermenting			BTU Required / Per Hour			Notes
  Tank Size	Ferments	Total Gal	Brix	Total Brix		Total BTU	Ferm Hrs	BTU/hr
  300	3	900	15	422		118,125	72	1,641	Three 300 gallon fermenters
  Total Load
  						BTU Required / Per Hour			Notes
  						Total BTU		BTU/24hr
  						467,985		16,218

  silk city distillers replied 6 months, 1 week ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  silk city distillers

  Member

  June 7, 2024 at 10:09 am

  The biggest risk is crash cooling during active fermentation, where you warm your CLT, and subsequently your chiller coolant loop temperature above the set points of the fermenters or your carb tank (which would be cooler).  One active strategy here would be to pre-chill your CLT even further the night before mashing, which would allow you to store more BTUs of cooling capacity.

  We run a similar setup, except our coolant tank runs the still, not the crash cooling.  We recover the hot water from crash cooling in our HLT for mashing.

  You likely would not be able to mash twice in one day with this setup.  We run into this issue with distilling twice in one day.  We run water as our coolant, so we can easily dump the holding tank on very hot days and refill with cold ground water.  Not ideal, but a few times a year doesn’t seem so bad.

   

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