Tutorial: How I Clean My Heat Exchanger! 

Thanks, will do!

I'm a brewer on a similar sized system who follows a similar procedure so I'll give my version of the answers. 1) Efficacy of rinsing. Sticky wort residue and caustic rinse better with hot water and when you've got an HLT just feet away, it's easy to just use that water for rinsing. Also, your caustic cycle needs to run pretty hot so no point cooling everything down by using city water on the initial rinse just to have to immediately heat it back up during your caustic cycle. That being said, the real reason is just hot water does a better job. 2) Rinsing the HX front and back helps dislodge any chunky stuff that is trapped in the plate channels. Plate style HXs have a ton of relatively small channels that trub and crust can clog up pretty easily, so introducing some aggressive backwards flow during CIP is important to breaking those clogs up. At my brewery we prioritize backflowing the CIP for that purpose, as sometimes you just don't have time to be going forward and backward. As for why backflowing the initial rinse, the caustic has a certain soil load that it can effectively clean before it is spent. In other words, the caustic gets used up when it comes in contact with organic soil and then it is no good. Might as well clear out as much soil as you can before introducing the caustic and wasting it on a chunk of trub stuck in the HX that could've easily been backflowed out with water. Keep in mind that knocking out from kettle to your fermentor takes the better part of an hour and any chunks have been getting pumped deeper into those channels during that time. 3) We reverse flow by hooking a mobile pump cart up to the outlet of our HX. Our simplified process piping looks like this: kettle drain -> butterfly valve -> tee with drain valve to floor -> permanent mount kettle pump -> tee with a connection to whirlpool arm/CIP arm and connection to HX wort in -> HX -> HX wort discharge. We use a yeast brink keg as a caustic reservoir and connect a mobile pump cart to pump caustic backwards into the HX wort discharge. We then connect a hose to that initial floor drain valve on the tee and let that flow back into the yeast brink to complete the loop. Sorry that is so confusing, it's a difficult thing to describe without some sort of visual aid. My system does not have the distribution panel like Adam's, so the methodology is a bit different but the concept is largely the same. I just use hoses between different valves instead of the unions and the wrench.

@@randolphdew4 Your explanation is excellent, I understand what you are saying and it makes sense to do it that way. Thanks for taking the time to write out such a detailed reply to my question!!

@@JohnL9013 Of course, I love getting a chance to talk shop, especially with homebrewers. I started brewing beer on my 3rd floor apartment balcony in college and used the bathtub in a spare bathroom as my temp control, half submerging the carboy in water and tossing some ice in if things were getting too warm. Making beer is making beer, commercial brewers just have different priorities and methods than homebrewers. Feel free to reach out if you ever have any questions or if you're ever in the lowcountry!

Discussing tonight on the livestream

If you have a plate style counterflow chiller, absolutely. If you have the tube-in-tube coil style it's less important but can't hurt.

answering on tonights livestream!

75-90 min depending on the operator.

As in the rinse water after cleaning the heat x?

Discussing this tonight on the livestream