The hardest part of using

sThe first day we used the Shirron Wort Chiller was the first brew day of the season. It was one of a number of upgrades we had applied to a pretty old, all-gravity system. By the time we got to the wort chiller, we were pretty hesitant, since equipment failures had forced our hand a couple of times already during the day. However, the Shirron did not let us down. The hardest part of using the Shirron was the setup. We had to find some 1/2? NPT female connectors with the PEX endings so we could connect the hose easily, and we got quick disconnects for the garden hose. If this sounds easy to you, you’re right. and that’s the hardest part of using the thing. We ran the wort straight out of the boil kettle at 212F, into portable glycol chiller, and it came out VERY cold. It was really kind of surreal. Here’s a unit that’s about 10 x 3 x 1, it looks like nothing - and you can barely hold the hose bringing the wort from the boiler, and the hose coming out of the chiller is actually cold. We’ve determined that next time we probably should not run the garden hose at full steam, which means we can easily do the job without wasting near as much water.
Another worry I had was what the flow rate was going to be like, being that we were doing this purely with gravity - no pumps. We ran an entire 5-gallon batch right into the fermentor in under 10 minutes. Perfection has been achieved. We bought chiller unit figuring that if it seemed like a workable solution, maybe we’d upgrade to the Therminator at some point. However, this worked so exceedingly well that we cannot imagine what the Therminator could possibly do to make it sell for over $100 more than the Shirron. At $85US, the Shirron seems like a no-brainer to me. On Tuesday, chiller ice rinks water temperature was still stable at the expected temperature value. I was a little concerned about the return pressure, which was ~0.2 bars. I called Facilities and asked if Jason Hinkley could come back and take a look. He returned while I was off site at Corporate Woods. He apparently tried opening and closing one of the valves that goes to the chiller. When I returned to the Annex, the chilled water temperature had climbed from ~10 C to ~35 C. I went up on the roof and looked at the chiller. The red Flow Reset button was flashing. I pushed it. The chiller made noises, the temperature climbed above 40 C, and then it started dropping and in < 30 minutes stabilized at 8-10 C. I called Charley again. Sometime during the day on Tuesday, he discovered that air carrier chiller should have set up a contract for us with a third-party contractor (in this case, Tri-R) to service the Krauss chiller. He told me that they would send someone out tomorrow morning. On Wednesday morning, I met with Kyle of Tri-R mechanical. We went up to the chiller on the roof. He believed that the chiller failed because it did not have enough glycol. He said that the chiller should have had another 3 pounds of glycol added to it when it was first set up. He added glycol to the baja chiller mexico rental on the roof using a rubber hose. The chiller would apparently not accept any more glycol through a hose because of the cold temperature. We then went down to the equipment room, and he used a pump to add some additional glycol to the system. On Thursday morning, Kyle came back and installed shielding around the intake vents of the chiller. He left six inches of space between the vents and the shielding, so that the shielding should not need to be removed when the warmer weather arrives.