Extract Brewing - Cooling down wort by adding cold water?

Question

I don't have a wort chiller yet. I always cool down my wort with 20 pounds of ice and bucket that I place my kettle into.

Since I am extract brewing and will be adding 2.5 gallons of water anyways, I figured why not cool down that water and add it directly to the wort while its in the ice bath? I just did that and the temperature dropped to below 80 in a matter of minutes.

However I was brewing a double IPA which required flame-out addition of hops, which I performed in my hop bag. So the flameout hops were only in contact with the wort for about 10 minutes total before I moved transferred the wort to my carboy.

Additionally, I've read that extract brewers use much more hops than full grain brewers due to the former using half as much water.

Here are my questions:

1. Is it bad for an extract brewer to add 2.5-3 gallons of cold water directly to the wort before it cools down?
2. I should start all grain brewing in 2 weeks (hopefully). Is there any consequences to adding cold water if the evaporation rate took my batch below what I was aiming for?

Answer 1

1. As long as the water is clean and free of chlorine, go for it. I use bottled water or previously boiled water this way.

2. Same as number 1, but cleanliness is less of a problem if you are still boiling the wort.

Additionally: hops oils can reach saturation quite easily in a DIPA, maybe use some software to calculate the IBUs that would be recovered using a full volume boil vs 1/2 volume.