Has anyone done anything like this? Would it work?
Plumb in the lines to the water heater like normal and dump cold water into the tank.
When the temperature inside the tank gets low enough it would kick on a pump to recirculate the water through a flat plate heat x-changer instead of kicking on the electric element inside the water heater.
Pump would then kick off when tank is up to temp.
You could, but if your going to add a pump anyways, just install one of those that always keeps hot water in your lines.
Putting the flat plate ahead of the water heater works well enough and its simple. Remember KISS, the golden rule of engineering which all engineers seem to have forgotten. KISS,
Keep
It
Simple
Stupid. The simpler you can keep it, the less chances of something going wrong in the future.
WE got to looking at upgrading corn planters, some of the new ones will have an electric motor on each seed meter, so going around a long corner the outside will run faster while as you go to the inside of the circle they will run slower so each row will in theory have a perfect population. In theory it’s great, out in the field surrounded by dust, vibration and moisture its gonna be a gigantic cluster f*ck when one of the connectors in a VERY expensive wiring harness gets a little corrosion. The old planters as long as everything turned, they planted corn, period.