I have been using my HLT or BK to heat PBW cleaner for the fermenter clean up (5-7 gallons of water needed) with CIP spray ball. Normally, this would be perfect to clean just with all my brew setup, but it is less and less convenient to do then. I normally clean all the brew day stuff with scrub pad and bar keeps friend and hot water. The fermenter is 2-3 weeks later and it really screams that it wants just 3 gallons of 180'F PBW. Well, that is close to the minimum volume I can heat in my HLT and it is not great at getting all the liquid out of the vessel (it still has a dip tube and misses about 1/2 gallon on pickup).
So...I saw an article from Smarty Pints on youtube that had simple construction of a RIMS tube heating element and TC fittings. While they said they had links on their web page to order the parts, I sure couldn't find them (and I really wanted the custom 1.5" TC inlet/outlet tube).
So, I just started ordering some parts to construct it myself as cheaply as possible. First, it was not going to fit the ripple heater elements from my BK/HLT, as that needed about a 5" diameter container. I needed a tee for the heating element and flow inlet on one side, some length of tubing and then a tee on the outlet for flow and thermal probe pickup.
I went with a straight (but folded back) 3500W 240v element that was about 8" long on a 1.5" TC. I was tempted to use a 2" TC one, but that only came in the ripple element, and while I seriously considered trying to do a 5" TC tube to fit the larger 5500W ripple like in the HLT/BK, I quickly realized that was not even close to cheapest solution and didn't meet the small form factor intent and it would not be able to be swapped into my 1.5" HLT/BK application in a pinch if needed if using the 2" TC. So, I went with the best 3500W straight element option with TC that I could find, a cheap 1.5" tee into a 1.5" to 2" TC into a 2" sight glass (just because I love these sight glasses and they are cheap and going to 2" wasn't really any more expensive than a 1.5" tube) into a 2" TC to 1/2" NPT male on the outlet end.
I needed to also supply a temp probe pickup at the end and just put it on a 1/2" NPT tee with flow out to my standard rigged high temp plastic male QD.
The final task was to find a place to mount it upright (I didn't like it horizontal and while it would have been nice to have free standing, I was worried about the temp probe pickup and sight glass getting knocked around and broken and it was going to need to be near the brew frame control panel for power and temp readings anyway. So, I wanted to mount in with the heating element on the bottom (flow up) so that there wouldn't be air pockets trapped next to the heating element and the heated liquid was going to naturally want to convection up as you can see in the second video at the bottom. I even tested powering the element with the pump off for a short time, and it quickly begins to heat up and starts convective flow...
I got it all mounted where I can swap either the HLT or BK plug onto it and routed the temp probe line to the front to be plugged into either the HLT or Boil temp PID plug easily. Using both the HLT and the Boil heater draws about 35 amps, and is a respectable 9000W. I found (accidentally) that I could go from 50'F to boiling with them both on heating 14.5 gallons in HLT in less than 22 minutes. I was thinking it would be much closer to 35 minutes and it made a bit of a bubbling mess when I came back out at 25 minutes and had water all over the floor and the pump cavitating...grimace. I actually created an XLS tool to help compute time, delta temps and volume for specific temp of water (times efficiencies due to loss to ambient) and found I'm like 99% efficient on tests down below 150'F. Once you get up over that, the losses to ambient go up to the point where I'm down to about 65% with ambient air at 50'F just before boiling. That is better with lids and the neoprene jackets or in summer at 90'F.
Below is some video of the final setup turning on the pumps for recirc out of the HLT, through the pump, into the RIMS tube, and back into the HLT. Draw is about 23.5a on the HLT 5500W ripple element and 14.5a on the 3500W element at 240v. Running both at the same time drops my supply to about 234v and total of 37.5a for something slightly below the theoretical 9000W (about 8775W).
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