RIMS style HEX for heating strike water?

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I can't seem to find a discussion of it, so here goes...

I'm starting down the road of electrifying my brew setup. I want to start with the HLT, but was reading about issues of heat stratification if you just stick a high wattage element in there without some sort of stirring mechanism. So, I was thinking about building something like the RIMS pipe bomb HEX, with a 4-5,000 watt element to recirc my strike water through. Would avoid stratification issues and have the side benefit that I could use the same HEX to maintain my mash temps. Does anyone use a setup like this? Are there issues I'm overlooking? Thanks for reading.

fluxgame said:

I want to start with the HLT, but was reading about issues of heat stratification if you just stick a high wattage element in there without some sort of stirring mechanism.

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I don't know much about rims/herms, but isn't that how most herms systems are? Just a heating element in the hlt, with a heat exchange coil?

The way I understand it, you need a stirrer in an eHERMS HLT as well. Even more so really, since you've got heating from the element and cooling from the HERMS coil.

The idea of a 4500 watt rims heater for strike heating is valid, operate on 240 VAC for water heating and drop voltage to 120 VAC for RIMS wort heating. You could use same sensor and PID controller with a voltage switching contactor to switch between 120 - 240 VAC. If you added a check valve to the recirculating pump you could feed the strike water through the element as you fill to save time.

kladue said:

If you added a check valve to the recirculating pump you could feed the strike water through the element as you fill to save time.

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So, feed tap water through the element to the HLT to fill it? Sort of like one of those instant hot water dealies? Huh. I like it. I think I'm missing the purpose of the check valve though. Can you elaborate?

The check valve after the pump will make water flow through RIMS chamber and on to sparge ring. Water is fed through tee between check valve and RIMS chamber so you can do strike and sparge heating. With 2 valves on the pump discharge you can send wort to mas or boi; kettle. If you measure level in mash and boil kettle you can fill strike to level in mash, and keep wort level constant in mash tun with sparge water until sparge volume of wort has flowed to boil kettle, then shut off water and keep pumping wort to boil kettle.

kladue, can you elaborate on the voltage switching contractor? Perhaps a link or manufacturer. Forgive me if you have covered it elsewhere, I couldn't find it in the search

The reference to voltage switching contactor is a simple 30 amp contactor with normally closed contact wired to neutral an normally open contact wired to second 120 volt feed for 240 volts across element. When the contactor coil is energized 240 volts is available for element power for high output, when de-energized the voltage across element is 120 volts. This lets you switch between 4500 watts and 1250 watts as modes of operation change. If needed I could put an example diagram together to show how this would work with PID, SSR, contactors, high temp cutout switch, and mode switch.

I think I am following you. A diagram would be excellent.