How do you clean plate chillers?

[Nosybear]

I have a plate chiller for my new brewery. As far as chilling the wort, love it! It's fast and doesn't waste a lot of water. But I have the nagging fear that gunk will get trapped in it, either plugging the chiller or contributing to off-flavors. I could bag my hops or use a hop spider but that seems to be defeating the point. Does anyone else use a plate chiller and how do you clean it?

I have mine soaking in lye solution right now....

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

run hot pbw 180F or higher through it for 10 minutes, then switch directions for another 10 then start with a clean solution and do it all over again, it took me about 4 tries this way to clean mine that had been sitting in the attic for a couple of years, yours won’t be this bad but I finally got it clean

 

[ChicoBrewer]

I don't have one but I hear people put them in the oven to dry...

 

[ukbrewer@gmail.com]

Immediately backflush the chiller once you’ve finished. Then same as Ozark, recirculate pbw, followed by hot water rinse and then star San or saniclean.

 

[HighVoltageMan!]

I have used them and your right about hops plugging them. Back flushing right away and PBW is the best, but I'm not sure PBW is needed every brew if you sanitize with boiling water or the hot wort itself.

If you brew and it gets plugged in the middle of cooling your batch, I have removed them from the boil kettle and back flushed them with tap water. Once it's opened up again, circulate hot wort though it for a minute or so, returning the hot wort to the boil kettle. It's a fast way to sanitize on the fly.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the cooling water needs to be off when sanitizing with hot wort.

 

[Hogarthe]

I would say pbw is needed every brew. Only time I wouldn't use it is if you were doing a second batch the same day, then you could just back flush with water. I wouldn't chance leaving crud on there to dry on.

 

[atoughram]

I've got a wort strainer inline with mine and then I backflush it after I'm done. I'll run PBW every once in awhile and have tried recircing caustic through it too.