A baptistry heater is water heating device used in baptistry pools by various religions throughout the world. Three main types of heaters are immersion, circulation and gas/LP. A baptistry heater can range from 3 kW to 11.5 kW of power and can heat water from 54 degrees, which is average occurring temperature that it comes out of the ground in the North American continent.
Over the last 100 years or so the modern baptistry heater was developed. The first modernized baptistry heater was developed by W.E. McCorquodale in 1904 by creating a natural gas heater. He began to work on developing a heater that would warm the water by using heavy copper coils that would transfer the heat from the elements to the water. Today’s 21st century baptistry heater works in a similar way. Instead of natural gas or liquid propane (called LP) electricity is used in 95% of the modern churches today. The two basic styles, an Immersion style heater, which you drop into the baptistry tank and the circulation style, which operates with a pump to push the water through the heater. Each system from all three manufacturers uses Incoloy steel elements. Incoloy is a form of metal that contains properties that help prevent corrosion.
Over the decades, baptisteries have changed mainly from cement and steel to fiberglass baptistry. During this transition the companies that produced baptistry heaters had to make some adjustments to the units so the fiberglass would not melt or warp in the heating process. Those adjustments included high limit switches, adjustable temperature controls and GFCI outlets found in the Hydro-Quip and ChurchRite models. These adjustments have proven to be much safer than earlier models. In the turn of the 21st century two new manufacturers have come into the market, Hydro-Quip® in 2007 and ChurchRite® in 2009. These two companies have taken a 21st century approach to heater systems by integrating GFCI engineering in them. Both Little-Giant and ChurchRite make similar models with the elements coming from the manufacturing facility in Mexico City, Mexico owned by Odgen, now known as Chromalox. Hydro-Quip uses a hot tub heater design for is basic operation and adds in additional feature for baptistry heating. The Immersion heater is identical with minor design changes enough to keep the US patents separated including the GFCI components. Each company offers a UL Listing, Little-Giant under Tempco's UL listing of E234452, Hyrdo-Quip® has a separate UL listing under E99812 and ChurchRite is E22869 respectfully.
Today all three companies offer both immersion and circulation systems ranging from 5.5KW to 11.5KW heating units, 3KW units are rarely sold in the United States however they have a prominent usage in Brazil in the process of bio-fuels as ChurchRite sells internationally. Although each has differences in design, the fundamental function of each unit is the same, to heat the water.
Wiedermann heaters were an alternative to Little-Giant in the 1960's-1980's until they went out of business. Little-Giant is located in Orange, Texas, Hydro-Quip is based in California and ChurchRite in the mountains of Virginia.