Same with me. I just clamped some s/s quick disconnects to a short length of silicone tubing, then clamped those to the wort side of the chiller.
Looks like I’m a bit late on this one but if you’re still soliciting opinions, I have a duda diesel plate chiller and I love it. With 54F well water I can chill to even lager fermentation temps while pumping straight into the fermenters.
I personally have never had an issue with “gunk” in my chiller. When I boil water for my sparge I pump it through to sanitize the pump, lines and chiller even though a few seconds of boiling wort would do the same thing. Then when finished I’ll flush it in both directions with boiling or near boiling water.
The only time I’ve ever had a clog was once when my hops bag came loose and dumped a few ounces of hops into the kettle. A quick flush backwards cleared it right out and on with the show. Don’t believe the horror stories you may hear. Like any other aspect of the hobby it just requires a little attention to detail.
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Yeh I’m still weighing all my options. Not in any rush, since they all cost around 200 bucks, and I would like to have it set up in a way that works smoothly for me on brew day.
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Do you use an in-line thermometer with this?
I do have an inline thermometer in my setup. I don’t think they’re very accurate however. Mine is about 2 degrees F higher than my thermopen so I always keep that in mind when using it.
Below is a picture of my setup. I BIAB. The kettle on the left is my MT/BK, the kettle on the right is my HLT. The inline thermometer is hard to see in this picture but it’s on the “wort out” post of my plate chiller on the upper right side of the brew cart. I’ll move the thermo depending what I want to read. In this picture I had just finished chilling and was flushing the system, hence the location on the out post.
Nice! Thanks for sharing that. I have the exact kettle setup and also do biab. I’ve also been working on a cart so that everything is mounted and easy to use
My cart is pretty simple. Since I don’t weld the angle steel worked great and has proved plenty strong enough. Nothing fancy but it gets the job done.
I dig it! I built my brew stand out of wood, it’s a 3 tiered approach so that gravity can help move from HLT to MT to BK. I have a pump to recirc the wort during vorlauf because I hate doing that by hand. I use my above mentioned method of cooling because it just works best for my setup and was pretty cheap.
I just finished automating the system (I write industrial automation software for a living) myself, and it worked like a champ
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SWEET! How did you beat the scrappers to it?
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Not sure… it was literally on the side of an off ramp on the freeway so I lugged it away. Pretty heavy cart
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With the sale NB was having, I was ready to pull the trigger… It is… out of stock… Next time … Sneezles61
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HMMM…I don’t know if that cart will hold the weight…hahahaha
How long do counter flow chillers take to get to pitching temp?
Yeh doubt it
Depends on the ground water temp. In the winter around here, I can get 10 gallons to lager pitching temp in 10-15 minutes. In the summer, it takes a bit longer.
I’ve been following this conversation for a while and thought I’d chime in. I use both personally. I use an Immersion chiller coupled with a pump for recirculating/whirlpooling for heavily hopped beers (link for reference photos), and a CFC for everything else. I only do 5 gallon batches (for now 
). The immersion chiller with the recirc setup can drop from boil to 170 in 5 mins or less easily, then once my whirlpool is finished, it takes probably 15-20 mins to get down to the upper 60s. I got my immersion chiller free as part of a sale our hosts were running a few years back, a bigger one would help with time on this.
For 90+% of my beers, I use my CFC. I have a gravity fed setup using my Little Giant Ladder with two platforms.
It’s probably not ideal to lift 6 gallons of boiling liquid to the top platform and eventually I’m hoping to get an electric side by side setup, but that’s down the road a ways. Ground water temp varies by season so in the winter, I actually have to turn down the hose volume to keep it from chilling too cold, because it will easily get down into the 50’s in the dead of winter. In the summer I typically run full bore with the hose and the valve on my kettle about halfway open and get it down to the upper 70’s as fast as I can run it through the chiller in my gravity setup, then the carboy goes in my swamp cooler setup with ice bottles, until it’s down to pitching temp before bed.
As for cleaning, I simply run StarSan through the CFC from a bucket and cap both ends with StarSan in it. I’ve never done anything more than that and never had an issue in over 4 years. Occasionally it will get clogged if it’s a highly hopped beer, but then I simply use a bike pump to force air through it and that always solves the issue.
The immersion chiller setup, I spray and scrub off the outside of the chiller and the inside of the kettle, then refill the kettle, heat to 120, then add PBW and recirc everything for about 20 mins. Then I dump that, rinse down, refill to cover the chiller, reheat to 100ish, and recirc the rinse water through everything for about 10 mins. The chiller/pump recirc setup takes about an extra hour total to clean up, but most of that time I’m off doing something else and only go back when the timer goes off.
Rad
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Thanks for chiming in @radagast I am thinking plate or counter flow now more than the immersion. The immersion I have now takes forever to cool 5 gallons so I probably wont go that route
Just to toss a little mud in the water for you (or hops in the wort), the Hydra is comparable to @radagast 's setup timewise. I think if I were doing a dedicated setup I’d look at a CFC or plate and figure out a way to keep the debris out of it and backflushing with boiling stuff prior to using and after using. I’ll be interested to see where you land on this. 
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There are also people that deal with the warmer ground water issue by using an immersion chiller in a bucket of ice water to feed the CFC. I haven’t tried it myself, but conceptually a great idea. That way you can utilize both what you already have and what you want. 
Also, Mullerbrau who was an old forum contributor that I scrounged a lot of information from used dual Chillzilla’s in series in his 25 gallon setup. I wonder whatever happened to Greg, he was a wealth of information. Looks like his website that I was going to link for you is down too.
Rad
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