Crock Pot Herms Heat Exchanger

[addis29]

For the hell of it I put tap water in my Crock Pot on high, and in about 25 minutes the water was hovering around 160 degrees. I turned it to medium and about 45 minutes later I was still at 157. Is this the dumbest idea ever?

 

[ScubaSteve]

Nope. Excellent idea. If you wanna do a mini batch, it might work awesome. I would turn it off once you reach 10 degrees of your target, then cover. The question is, what size batch could you make?

 

[Catt22]

Probably won't have the power to keep up with the heat draw down when you run the HERMS. Perhaps if it was a humongous crock pot or a very small batch size you could get it to work, but with only 110 v input I just don't see it generating enough heat fast enough. I did experiment with mashing directly in a crock pot. I wanted to see if I could make some starter wort quickly. It worked, but I deemed it not worth the hassle in the end. A small cooler would have probably been a better way to go. I've abandoned that approach and now I'm planning to just make a larger batch of wort and can it.

 

[addis29]

It holds a gallon and a half of water. I've seen some people on here with a small heat exchanger around two gallon. I was just suprised it stayed in the 160 range. I might try recirculating through it just for fun.