I am in the middle of designing my new brewery. I am sizing everything to be able to do 15 gallon batches. I like the idea of a HERMES setup but Having a dedicated HERMES for heating the mash and a separate wort chiller seems redundant to me, they are both heat exchangers just using different working fluid sources for heating and cooling. So my idea is to use a single heat exchanger for both heating and cooling of wort. In the heating phase wort would be pumped from the mash turn through the heat exchanger and hat water from the HLT would be used as the working fluid to heat the mash similar to a HERMES. After the Boil valves would be switched on the working fluid side of the heat exchanger to switch from the HLT supply to cold water for the cooling phase. I am also trying to size the Heat exchanger so i can get a single pass cooling to fermentation temp so i can just pump wort from the boil through the heat exchanger into my fermenter. This is the Heat exchanger I am looking at using. It's original use is for solar heating swimming pools and is rated for 155k btu so i think it would do a hell of a job on a 15 gallon batch
http://www.nlsolarheating.com/solar-pool-heat-exchanger-stainless-steel-sp155k-p-8.html
any thoughts on this heat exchanger or on what i plan to do???
http://www.nlsolarheating.com/solar-pool-heat-exchanger-stainless-steel-sp155k-p-8.html
any thoughts on this heat exchanger or on what i plan to do???