Titanium heat exchanger for aquarium drip

[Damascus]

It has recently crossed my mind how inefficient my fish room is and how many hundreds extra it is probably costing me per month.

One of the biggest losses of energy is my drip systems, over flowing approximately 400gpd of 83° water that I am dumping down the drain.

I would like to use a titanium heat exchanger to harvest some of this heat, and apply it to the incoming drip water, so at least there is some recycling of energy and the incoming temp is not so low. Incoming water is 45-55°. With how much I am dripping per day, I know this has to be an additional tax on my heaters, costing me more money.

How do you recommend I approach this topic? How do you have yours set up?

 

[wednesday13]

Maybe we need something like this lol..
theres some even smaller options with digital read outs for temp setting. Im not sure if it would backfire running 24/7 on a drip line tho. Theres gotta b an inline heater option that uses less watts even tho most fish rooms prob have more than 1500w in tank heaters.

 

[Damascus]

View attachment 1562296
Maybe we need something like this lol..
theres some even smaller options with digital read outs for temp setting. Im not sure if it would backfire running 24/7 on a drip line tho. Theres gotta b an inline heater option that uses less watts even tho most fish rooms prob have more than 1500w in tank heaters.

I'm running 1500w heaters on controllers lol. My 500 alone has 2500w worth.

I'm thinking more in lines of something to recycle the energy out of the waste water. No sense in dumping 82° degree water down the drain and paying to heat up new water again

 

[Damascus]

View attachment 1562296
Maybe we need something like this lol..
theres some even smaller options with digital read outs for temp setting. Im not sure if it would backfire running 24/7 on a drip line tho. Theres gotta b an inline heater option that uses less watts even tho most fish rooms prob have more than 1500w in tank heaters.

It seems cheap enough to try though and see if it can handle a constant draw. I might get one and play with it

 

[Cal Amari]

I've never done any of this and maybe this is a dumb idea, but what if your outgoing water went to a small holding tank, that would still overflow to the drain or garden or whatever, and the drip line going to the tanks ran through this holding tank? Seems like the old water would raise the temp of the incoming water some, likely depends a lot on time spent in there, flow rate, how long the line is running through the holding tank etc. Just an idea from someone with no experience.

 

[Damascus]

I've never done any of this and maybe this is a dumb idea, but what if your outgoing water went to a small holding tank, that would still overflow to the drain or garden or whatever, and the drip line going to the tanks ran through this holding tank? Seems like the old water would raise the temp of the incoming water some, likely depends a lot on time spent in there, flow rate, how long the line is running through the holding tank etc. Just an idea from someone with no experience.

Yes that's the idea behind the titanium heat exchanger, which should just maximize the efficiency of this idea.

Any idea on a titanium coil, vs a traditional exchange?

 

[Cal Amari]

Sorry, no experience here, I was picturing a Diy setup, but you're probably right that an engineered solution would be more efficient.

 

[Damascus]

Sorry, no experience here, I was picturing a Diy setup, but you're probably right that an engineered solution would be more efficient.

I'm just also not that handy and I like the idea of threaded fittings I can't wreck

 

[triamond]

I've just inserted an inline tube into the output hose, creating a 10 m pipe-in-pipe heat exchanger. It's quite effective – at a 4 l/h drip rate, the output water is only about 1°C cooler than the tank.