Here's my current contraption for cooling down the wort after it has boiled. The goal is to get down from boiling to pitching temperatures (say 75 degrees F in this case). Pre-Brewfles, I had made a counterflow chiller (copper tubing inside a waterhose... Wort goes through the copper tubing in one direction while cool water passes all around it inside the hose in the opposite direction). Here in College Station, tap water is in the low 80 degrees F, so I have to cool down the cooling water before it attempts to cool down the wort. I have a couple of coils of copper that I run through some water that I cool down with fancy frozen 2-liter bottles that I reuse over and over. This worked well with the counterflow chiller. Now I have a plate chiller (little metal block thingy in the pics with the 4 hoses coming out). Same principle here as the counterflow... Heat flows from the hot wort into the cold water as it passes each other on either side of stainless steel plates inside the chiller. I'm working out some kinks (literally) with my old water-chilling coils, so cooling hasn't been stellar. Much better this time than last week, but I think I can get a little more out of the setup and probably get rid of the pre-chiller-chiller in the fancy Home Depot bucket.