Portable water heater?

I've seen in brought up in some older threads, but I haven't heard of anyone actually using a portable propane water heater, like a camping shower, to pre-heat strike water or HLT water. Something like this http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001J4AU2E/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

Anybody ever use something like this? I'm brewing on a 20 gallon propane tippy-dump, and by far the biggest time-waster in my process is waiting for my water to reach strike temps. Looking for solutions to shave an hour off my brew-day, just wondering if anyone had used something of this nature. Cheers.

Per the manufacturer

Maximum Water Flow: 5L per minute (1.5 gallons) - raises water temp. 38º F
Minimum Water Flow: 2L per minute (.5 gallons) - raises water temp 102º F

http://www.campchef.com/triton-5l-portable-water-heater.html

40+ minutes to go from a reasonable tap water tempt to a reasonable strike temp.

Fair point, the flow rate would definitely leave a lot to be desire.

Burner would be going under the kettles while filling, so it would be less than 40 minutes to reach temps, but with that low of a flow rate it isn't likely worth the investment for this purpose...

Anyway you could fill the night before and just get a heatstick and put it on a timer or something? Still probably not worth it.

Nasty water in one of those.

Bradyfumbled said:

Fair point, the flow rate would definitely leave a lot to be desire.

Burner would be going under the kettles while filling, so it would be less than 40 minutes to reach temps, but with that low of a flow rate it isn't likely worth the investment for this purpose...

Click to expand...

You could recirculate through it to decrease heating time..... but at that point it's just a really expensive RIM tube.

iijakii said:

Anyway you could fill the night before and just get a heatstick and put it on a timer or something? Still probably not worth it.

Click to expand...

I've had that thought as well, though it has the obvious disadvantage of having to set everything up the day before.

Since upgrading to a bigger automated system, I've been thrilled with almost everything except for prep time... Just takes forever to get the bigger volume of water up to temps. My thinking was to go faucet to filter to portable shower to kettle. If it came out even shower temp it would cut my prep time dramatically.... But now that the flow rate has been pointed out to me, I can understand why more people haven't attempted

Cheers everybody, thanks for the replies.