[bluedog]

I brew about every 10-14 days and like some of you, I rinse off my chiller and hang it upside down for storage. About every 5-6 batches I have been cleaning my chiller with Barkeepers Friend back to shiny clean. It sounds like I might be wasting my time if that dark copper color and some grey (water spots?) aren't hurting anything.

[beveragebob]

Interesting.....I didn't know it was a fungicide....among other things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdigris

[tschmidlin]

Huh.  I didn't know it was used as a dye, and in medicine?!  That seems  . . . interesting for something that you should wash your hands after handling.  Although one of the cranky old scientists I work with likes to tell everyone that they used to inject people with ethidium bromide while he's bare-handing gels, to which I always reply that they used to bleed people too.

And to save people from having to look it up, we use ethidium bromide to mutagenize yeast and it is used in gels because it is a fluorescent DNA intercalator, so you look at it under UV and you can see where the DNA is on the gel.  But uh . . . that means it sticks itself into DNA and is not picky about what DNA, so while it might not penetrate your skin it still seems like a really bad idea to handle it if you don't have to, especially if you have any cuts.  Everyone else wears gloves.

[Slowbrew]

I just rinse my IC off and drain it too. 

A couple of years ago though it was starting to look a little bad and I thought "I should soak that".  I threw it in a bucket of PBW and walked away.  When I came back the surface of the PBW was a very dark gray, brackish color and my IC looked brand new.  It didn't look bad on the IC but whatever it was looked nasty in the pail of PBW.  I have no idea what was coating the copper but I decided to give it a soak now whenever it starts to look like something is starting to build up on it.  YMMV

Paul

[euge]

I rinse it well after use making sure no hop particles and such are adhering to the coils (mine are tightly bound) and then a good rinse and application of starsan before use to get any dust off.

Mine goes in at flame-out since it drops the temp immediately by at least 10 degrees.

[seajellie]

Interesting idea Euge. I'm so indoctrinated with the "boil for 15 minutes" idea that your technique never occurred to me.

Very handy too, as I've moved up to 10 - 12 gallon boils and I'm trying to keep my old chillin' equipment serviceable for another year (or until Christmas ;-)

So without a pump and parts I can add your idea to the list:

* add sterile ice blocks
* add chiller at flame out
* use a gravity-fed hopback for the extra aroma, and maybe kick off a few degrees too.

Must search, there may be a good thread for other ideas.

[Steve]

spray it off with the hose after every use, put in boiling wort with 15 left to go, never been an issue 

Bingo!

[CASK1]

spray it off with the hose after every use, put in boiling wort with 15 left to go, never been an issue 

This works for me, too.

The only time I used PBW is when it was new, and and the copper coil straight from the box still a little oily after I formed/made it into a chiller. 

Other than that, rinse, boil, repeat.

Ditto here. Once or twice a year I pull out a Brillo pad and give it a good scrubbing, but I doubt it really accomplishes much, other than briefly restoring that shiny, new look.