Hot oil heating?

[BlackAnvilBrew]

Anyone know of anyone using hot oil instead of steam to heat with? I work in injection molding currently & we use heated water/glycol, but I know that they use the same type of systems with hot oil to reach much higher temperatures for certain engineered plastics. I would think this would work well for heating/processing with in a brewery with jacketed pots. Is there a reason why not? I haven't looked into the price difference to know if it would be more or less economical yet, so that may be a good reason right there.

Thanks,

Mike

[Bainbridge]

There is also the concern about being food grade. A small steam jacket leak won't ruin your batch and/or people's day. Whatever (presumably mineral?) oil you'd use would, however.

[BeerBoy]

Anyone know of anyone using hot oil instead of steam to heat with? I work in injection molding currently & we use heated water/glycol, but I know that they use the same type of systems with hot oil to reach much higher temperatures for certain engineered plastics. I would think this would work well for heating/processing with in a brewery with jacketed pots. Is there a reason why not? I haven't looked into the price difference to know if it would be more or less economical yet, so that may be a good reason right there.

Thanks,

Mike

I worked with a hot oil system (very briefly...): http://discussions.probrewer.com/sho...ing-Method-Oil
Bottom line, it'd be more common if it was a viable alternative.

[Natrat]

I've seen bain-marie type jackets for breweries and stills before. Though oil heated kettles work really well for some applications, the issue for brewing beer is that they don't cool very fast, so you have to hang around for hours before you can clean your kettle, or have a CIP system that works well at relatively elevated temperatures. Best usage is for high-volume systems where the wort is moving into a whirlpool and new wort is moving into the kettle from a holding tank, rather than directly from sparge and lauter. Then the lack of heat loss is an advantage. Also, the time to preheat your kettle can be prohibitive.

In a still, it's actually an advantage because an oil jacket maintains a more even heat, and once your still is up to temp, you can run multiple batches with less equilibrium time...and some steam systems can surge, which plays havoc in a still.

Oil jackets DO tend to last longer than steam jackets, but at an end of the scale that is of little interest to brewers. Most of us aren't thinking 25 years in the future :-)

Hope that helps

[BlackAnvilBrew]

Thanks for the link. I did a search, but didn't see that for some reason.
Good point about the leaks. steam would be much cleaner that way for sure.

[Natrat]

Just another note,

it was pointed out to me by the guy standing behind me that oil is in fact has a lower specific heat capacity than water, and heats up and cools down pretty fast. I pointed out to him that oil is not a phase-change heating cycle, the way steam is. So we googled oil jacket kettles, found out what kind of oil they use, and did the math as to how long it would take to heat the oil to 212 F given a typical jacket volume.

Turns out that it isn't that long...depending, of course, on how many KW your electric heater is. BUT...those heating coils can't operate in reverse and suck heat out of the system, so given a limited area of heat transfer inside the kettle, it might take a long while for it to cool down. Filling it with water or wort would do it pretty quickly, though...and perhaps even hosing it off. Still, it's about 25 times as much mass to cool down as just the hot stainless after a steam boil.

Interesting stuff, though...

[SouthHouseBrew]

No HTO

IME Heat Transfer Oil (HTO) is used in applications where steam or direct heat is not an option. These were pretty unique circumstances: processes requiring higher temp than offered by the available steam source but with a product that degrades under direct heat. Luckily, boiling wort has neither restriction.

Reasons to use steam/direct heat if at all possible:

- HTO systems require additional equipment (pumps, holding tanks, heating elements, vacuum breaks, etc) that can be expensive or difficult to find on a small scale. I'll bet a boiler ends up being more cost effective.
- HTO is expensive. It degrades and requires periodic cleaning/replenishing. Even more so with food-grade since its less durable than the industrial stuff.
- HTO is flammable. Aside from dangerous, it makes cutting/welding on oil piping/jackets damn near impossible.
- It may make your brewery smell like the back of a Burger King (Think old fry oil).
- Jacket leak = ruined beer AND a significant amount of downtime.
- You can't sterilize with oil like you can with steam.

[liammckenna]

Once worked at a brewery with a 15 hL hot liquor tank heated with such a system. No issue ever. Oil was dyed blue in case of a leak (immediately detectable).

Extremely efficient. Little standalone 'microboiler' took care of heating/circulating through jackets.

BTW. I f I had a steam leak into my kettle with treated steam, I would likely dump that batch and repairs would probably take the same amount of time.

Pax.

Liam

PM me and I can tell you who supplied this unit.

[dick murton]

Microdat in the UK have recently produced oil heated wort kettles. Compared to steam heating this means there is no boiler water treatment, no energy losses due to condensate, no condensate recovery, no fouling of either boiler or wort kettle heating tubes, no risk of rust or other water induced corrosion. So if you are not using steam for other purposes, you get the advantages of steam in terms of good temperature transfer and control with low caramelisation compared to direct fired, but without the disadvantages of steam. I am sure they, and other suppliers of such systems will give another half dozen reasons why you should oil heating, but hose are the ones I remeber them talking about.

Have to say that I have never used one, and other comments made so far look perfectly valid to me.

[jcmcdowell]

60 gal Bain Marie Still in use for over 2 years with no incident...

A friend has a 60 gal still which has 3 elements inside the shell which heats the oil and has worked flawlessly for over 2 years without incident. The bain marie shell is pretty wide compared to steam jackets. He recently upgraded to a 600 gal still and the new boiler installed cost as much as the still $$$.

A high temp pump and a reservoir tank with a heating element makes HTO possible in lieu of a boiler for small breweries. I have a 200 gal steam jacketed open tank that I would like to make into a boil kettle. A boiler would cost possibly 10x the cost of the tank, but a HTO system....?