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Tankless Water Heaters

edited November 2014 in General

I got a Rinnai 98 hpi on demand hot water heater at a garage sale got it hooked up in my shop to feed my thurmo pressure washer. Had read some were that home brewers were using them to get there Hlt pre-warmed to save heat up time. I had ordered the 180 bend with 3/4" to hook up to my dash for CIP and was thinking I could run a line and use it for hot flushing my rig,maybe mashing? I tested it a little before i went to work It will run a continuous 3 gallon a minute at 175 to 180 degrees my well water is real cold (didn't take a temp reading yet) but with warmer incoming water a guy might be able to get more GPM maybe enough to mash. Are any members using one to mash?

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  • No idea of the exact model now because its been some years since I installed the tankless water heater at my old welding shop in the US but it needed a minimum water flow to operate. My apartment that was built adjacent to my office donned a shower but I had to flow a bit of hot water into the sink while taking a shower or it wouldn't trigger the tankless to heat the water.

  • edited November 2014

    If you got a garage sale price, you got a deal, that's a great unit. I'm assuming you have the commercial controller if you can hit 180, the residential controller will top out about 120F. It's big too, 199k btu. For you electric guys following, thats about 60kw of power, it's a serious heater. It'll take 55 gallons of water from 70 to 185 in 15 minutes.

    Yes, there are many brewers and even some distillers that use similar units. If your source water is warm enough so that you can hit your strike temp with usable flow rates, you are lucky (or live in a volcano).

    In a distilling situation you might have a hot coolant tank that you can use as input. You would need your spent coolant storage tank to be about 140 to hit 180 at the full 10gpm flow.

    Another option is to plumb it to recirculate your hot liquor tank, you'll need a plumbing recirculation pump that can handle the heat. With the commercial controller, you should be able to get the tank up near 185.

    If you don't have a storage tank or hlt, you can always run multiple units in serial, or preheat with gas and finish with electric to get you to boiling.

  • Grim , I like the sound of the third option It would kind of be like heating a slab with the same type of grunfros or taco recirculation pumps hooked up to a insulated tank? The guy at the garage sale said he got 3 of them at a government liquidation auction.I think they would have to be commercial units for the government to use them.No paper work with it. I was looking on Craigslist for used circulation pumps they are fairly cheap. So could a guy get a stainless 55 gallon drum hook up a pump to the unit recirculate until you reach say 140 then pull off of the 55 gallon of 140 and bring it up to 180 with some sort of manifold set up , for more GPM at 180

  • craigslist is where I got my rheem gt199, grim is right, they do need a minimum flow, but it is not all that high... I notice that they have 'hybrid' units now, they have a tiny reservoir that is heated that speeds up the hot water delivery.

  • edited November 2014

    We got some really good feedback from the good folks at Salt Water Brewery in Delray. They reckon that brew pubs would really appreciate the space saving foot print of a (2 or 3bbl) mash tun mounted/installed over a lauter tun. Sparging could be executed via gravity feed, and a tankless unit mounted to this arrangement would really keep the foot print compact.

    We have a drawing for the mash tun over a hot liquor tank as a little combo set up but they seemed really excited about the mash tun over the boil tank. Side mounting the hop back vessel would make the system even easier to engineer the gravity drain/feed to the lauter tun.

    Thoughts?

    StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America

  • i use a gas instantaneous hot water service as my HLT - works great to save lots of space & time. I use it to fly sparge directly into the mash tun.

    Don't see why you couldn't use it for post chemical CIP rinsing with hot water

  • @smaug - I wish I had better pics, I have drooled over this little system for a while, I now for the life of me cannot remember who made it, but pretty sure they are out of business.. it is owned by cigar city in tampa and was recently put into use in their system in the tampa airport. The one pallet you can see the base of is a couple fermenters with a small glycol chiller, the other pallet in the foreground is the combi-tun and boil kettle... (I think mash over boil will have it's own unique problems to brewing, but not insurmountable)

    image

    05-23-12 Tampa Airport brewing equipment.JPG
    800 x 745 - 59K
  • I have a 3 panel solar hot water system on the house. I've tapped into it before the temper valve and run a line to the brewery here at home.

    On a hot summers day it comes into the boiler at over 85C. It ranges depending on time of year from 65C to 85C. well and truley into mashing temp, i still heat it a little in the boiler to get up to a temp where i can dilute with cold to get an exact temp for my process, but it only takes ten minutes for 70-80 litres. And it's free before that.

    StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand

  • I have a gas fired continuous hot water heater. I was factory set for a 120F max, but the seller changed the control out, or reset it, for a 140F for nothing.

    I've also seen these things daisy-chained to get higher temps. Commercial dish washers do this all the time for 182F.

    DAD... not yours.. ah, hell... I don't know...

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