Chilling Ideas Wanted

[Vermont Smooth]

Our Distillery is under construction and we have come to cooling. We will have a 500 gal pot still and a 250 gal rectifying still, not to mention fermentation vats and a mash cooker. We think we will have a supply tank for chilled water, probably in the ground, and a receiving tank in house that we can hold to draw heat from in between runs before cooling and sending back to the supply tank. We have an engineer working with us to figure the most efficient cooler to use, but he has not worked on a distillery before. How do those of you with comparable production size deal with cooling. If you use a chiller, how big. I am very interested in innovations, but we also want what will work when my hair brain ideas don't! The pipe in the river is on hold for now. Thanks for your input.

[damonr]

Hello Vermont,

I can help you out with any chiller system sizing, if you'd like to get in touch with me my email address is

damonr@prorefrigeration.com

www.prochiller.com

[Guest Bonanza]

I used to do what you are planning.

I have two 300 Ltr stills and a 12000 Ltr ground reservoir solid made out of cement.

Running every day one batch the water got as hot as 50C on thursday, that made me to drill a water hole (well) for cooling water.

We recycle the cooling water once now, than it gets to a pond in our property.

[Vermont Smooth]

I used to do what you are planning.

I have two 300 Ltr stills and a 12000 Ltr ground reservoir solid made out of cement.

Running every day one batch the water got as hot as 50C on thursday, that made me to drill a water hole (well) for cooling water.

We recycle the cooling water once now, than it gets to a pond in our property.

Thanks, that helps.

[bluestar]

We have thought about this, and are thinking the correct thing to do is get a heat pump system that could be used for this purpose. One of the advantages of an integral system with building cooling/heating, is it would use waste heat from chillers to heat during the winter automatically.

[lswanson1]

I have recently gone through this problem myself. My "temporary" solution is using a Pro Refrigeration chiller unit, circulating pump and 2x300 gallon holding tanks hooked up in series. The primary circulating loop which feeds the cold water into the still and a bypass that mixes the hot water with the cold water so that the chiller unit can keep up easier. It works good and at the end of the day I just leave the chiller and circulating pump on and it cools it back down overnight. Its not a perfect setup because it doesnt utilize the heat in a productive way and its not super cost effective because it draws on electricity to chiller the water as well as heating the water. I am interested in working on a permanent setup as well for when I build my new building....in the hope that my business does well. Ground source heat pumps, chilling ponds, in floor radiant heat,...all kinds of ideas but its integrating them into a building with a working/limit free setup.

[Vermont Smooth]

I have recently gone through this problem myself. My "temporary" solution is using a Pro Refrigeration chiller unit, circulating pump and 2x300 gallon holding tanks hooked up in series. The primary circulating loop which feeds the cold water into the still and a bypass that mixes the hot water with the cold water so that the chiller unit can keep up easier. It works good and at the end of the day I just leave the chiller and circulating pump on and it cools it back down overnight. Its not a perfect setup because it doesn't utilize the heat in a productive way and its not super cost effective because it draws on electricity to chiller the water as well as heating the water. I am interested in working on a permanent setup as well for when I build my new building....in the hope that my business does well. Ground source heat pumps, chilling ponds, in floor radiant heat,...all kinds of ideas but its integrating them into a building with a working/limit free setup.

Thanks for the input. As we get set up, we hope to utilize "waste" heat as much as possible. Our system is big enough that at full production our radiant floor heating and hot water preheat won't touch the cooling capacity we need, but by having a tank system that stages 100F water from the condenser loop and likewise an intermediate tank for stillage at 200F we can loop to heat exchangers for the above mentioned purposes. We have a river next to us and lots of 50F ground, but the location is a flood plain so environmental concerns must be addressed and we need a system that will work anytime alternative cooling is not available. It is a work in progress. The latest estimate is for a 30 ton chiller with ice formation between runs to maximize cooling capacity during operation. Also included is a liquid to air heat exchanger for the cold months(we have several!, basically a big radiator outside.

Please keep the ideas coming.

Is there a place on forums where we might put a summary of equipment we use for heating, cooling, mashing, and of course distilling so that one could find others with similar systems or parts of systems with whom he/she could collaborate with?

[JohninWV]

Not chiller related, but radiant floor related.

We have a Morton Steel building. Our concrete floor is hot water radiant that runs off of a separate boiler. It's cold here, not as cold as Vermont, Montana, or Michigan...but cold. It's about 31 now with a low of 12 tonight and that's a little less than normal for winter. We leave our radiant heat on about 60 and it really only runs from about midnight to 7 am or so, about an hour after we start up.

When we are running our Carl 650, it stays about 70-75 degrees in here and if we are mashing too, it's about 80-85. In fact, we open the door to our tasting room and leave the heat off in there. It's a lot of heat on the still and it continues to radiate afterwards, as you might guess. I don't know what my point is other than to tell you, you're not gonna use a lot of heat in the floor...there's already plenty in the building; at least in my case.

[Vermont Smooth]

Not chiller related, but radiant floor related.

We have a Morton Steel building. Our concrete floor is hot water radiant that runs off of a separate boiler. It's cold here, not as cold as Vermont, Montana, or Michigan...but cold. It's about 31 now with a low of 12 tonight and that's a little less than normal for winter. We leave our radiant heat on about 60 and it really only runs from about midnight to 7 am or so, about an hour after we start up.

When we are running our Carl 650, it stays about 70-75 degrees in here and if we are mashing too, it's about 80-85. In fact, we open the door to our tasting room and leave the heat off in there. It's a lot of heat on the still and it continues to radiate afterwards, as you might guess. I don't know what my point is other than to tell you, you're not gonna use a lot of heat in the floor...there's already plenty in the building; at least in my case.

Got it. Thanks. We have a building abutting the distillery, also radiant, and what your observations point out in addition to the small amount of heat demand the building will have outside of distilling is that when we get our production up we will with a little imagination be able to heat both buildings with the residual heat from our distilling process all the time.

[chinookpilot77]

I am not a pro, just hoping to be someday.

I think the most effective use of waste heat and condenser cooling would be to use that heat to pre-heat your next batch as much as possible. If you run more than 1 cycle in a day, this would have to be the best way to use that heat. Should be as easy as dropping another condenser into your next batch of wash.

You'll still need additional cooling of course, you can't use 500 gallons to cool 500 gallons, but it would significantly reduce the cooling needed if you are preheating your next batch. It will save you time heating the next batch to boiling temp. It will save you time, money, energy and resources. I can't think of a better use myself.