Anyone brewing inline water only, ditching hlt?

[morrillt]

I am doing doble batches on a 10bbl brewhouse.... Curious if i should consider just going inline water heaters.... All the bre equip guys say dont do it. I dont really understand why its not possible with enough of em in parallel....

[DageraadBen]

Without an HLT you won't be able to recover your cooling water from your heat exchanger, which means wasting loads of water and energy. Even if you don't care about wasting water, the energy wasted costs you money. Recovered cooling water at my brewery is usually 65C to 70C, and it takes way less energy to heat that up to mash-in, sparge or cleaning temperature than water straight from the taps.

[TiminOz]

The most common refit is to add the continuous demand water heater post to filter to top up your current HLT so when you are doing a double brew you can easily keep the volume needed at an optimum temp.

[TGTimm]

Take a look at your water analysis. If you have high carbonate hardness, you will need to acid-flush that on-demand heater very frequently. Evn if the heater isn't clogging, a tiny deposit of calcite scale will reduce the efficiency greatly.

And then there's the point of saving/recycling your HX cooling water--ours comes out at around 140F--a big savings when heating water to 195F.

[MatthewS]

You want an HLT, but you can add a shell and tube heat exchanger to have instant hot water and just use the hLT to capture your knock out water.

So. mash in water is from HLT (smaller tank needed) and then use the steam heat exchanger for sparge and cleaning water.

Check out EnerQuip really nice gear

[wailingguitar]

My on demand heater does not supply enough flow to mash in with, I need 14gpm to keep up with my auger. Plus, you can't be as precise with temp from an on demand. Using my HLT I can set it to a certain temp ( I keep it at 190) then adjust temp down with cold water immediately before hydrator. I can hit the exact temp I want for anything that way. I do sometimes use my on demand for sparging the 2nd run of a double brew day if my HLT isn't hot enough at that point, and I use it to top up HLT and for my hot CIP

[morrillt]

You want an HLT, but you can add a shell and tube heat exchanger to have instant hot water and just use the hLT to capture your knock out water.

So. mash in water is from HLT (smaller tank needed) and then use the steam heat exchanger for sparge and cleaning water.

Check out EnerQuip really nice gear

Matt, I am not exactly sure I understand what enerquip is doing, what is this thing and how does it work ? looks cool....

[MatthewS]

Matt, I am not exactly sure I understand what enerquip is doing, what is this thing and how does it work ? looks cool....

The model I have used in another brewery essentially uses steam from the boiler to heat water within the shell and tube to instantly give you as much hot water as you will ever need. You can set the temp and flow rate for anything in the brewery (rinsing, mash in, sparge etc). These are not cheap though. The advantage is efficiency and with an HLT, redundancy.

[BigDogsGrant]

I am doing doble batches on a 10bbl brewhouse.... Curious if i should consider just going inline water heaters.... All the bre equip guys say dont do it. I dont really understand why its not possible with enough of em in parallel....

I'm on a 10 bbl system with no HLT. The last place I worked ended up hooking up 2 Noritz heaters together and that wasn't too bad. I'll be working off of only one now.

The biggest challenge, other than the cellar using hot water and throwing off your flow meter, is pH for sparging. Our water has pretty significant Total Alkalinity, so mashing around 5.4 and sparging over to the kettle usually cruises on through the buffer. My current technique is to mash at the desired pH, then add more acid in the vorlauf to hit somewhere between 4.9 & 5.2 pH, depending on the beer, TA that day, and amount of sparge water. The problem with that is then you're usually too low on pre-boil pH and have to add pickling lime to the kettle to bump your pH back up.

That calculation is something I have to wing a little bit with Bru N Water, but I would imagine you could find a pretty reliable way to calculate it if you were so inclined. Baking soda is another option for raising pH but our Sodium is already really high.

Otherwise flow rate for hot rinses on tanks can be an issue. I've started filling up the kettle with hot water and using that to feed off of.