Home Distiller

To truly run e-85 you need larger injectors, not a remap alone. You get a lower hp output without increasing injector size and a increase in fuel consumption. Imho a boondoggle perpetuated by lobbyists. If you are building high performance engines it is a fuel that can be utilized to make more powe...

propane. eBay is FULL of these conversion kits to convert a common Honda gas generator (or any of the chinese clones) into dual fuel that runs on gas or propane, around 100-200 bucks. dont think that includes any modification to valves. never tried one myself tho. Mostly driven by cafe standards. F...

You completely missed on this one. Etoh burns slower (higher octane) and cooler than gasoline. It does have less energy per gallon. Than gasoline. it does kill regular engines, and even the ones made for running it are you talking about normal wear and tear aka entropy that wears out every engine a...

does anyone actually do it no one actually does it and posts here it seems. people who arent interested in it, find reasons to dismiss it. those who believe in it, suggest ways to make it work. this forum is a wealth of information for design and operating distilling equipment, very important piece...

Regarding taxes, it's hard to say specifically because laws are always changing, and are specific to country and even state (if in USA), however from what I've read the tax situation for fuel was very different than for drinking alcohol. Currently in the most expensive state in USA gas prices includ...

sorry to interrupt this conversation of drinking in the Fuel Forum :) J/K But I did want to bring this topic back and ask Doug a question, ok you made a fuel still work as you said, so are you still running it today? is there other problems with fuel production as a business besides the technical ma...

I would like to express my respect and gratitude to everyone who has spent time and effort building and observing something, and choosing to share what they have learned in that process with other people. From what I have been able to find drmiller100 has shown the only continuous still for small sc...

Directional Heat Exchanger These things? Untitled.png The energy in them comes from the 4000w element. Pump in small amount like 2gph of beer maybe it works. Pump in 20 gph of beer, I think you would have cold beer going down the drain and the 2nd heat exchanger would stop heating your incoming bee...

Are you factoring the boiling point of a 10% beer? Or the boiling point of water? Using boilting point of water. since it sounds like everyone agrees the bottom should be 99%+ water if things are right, otherwise alcohol is going down the drain. So using water heat of vaporization, and with the sta...

4000 watts is pretty good for 3 inch reflux column with marbles. 3 inch rectifier with 20 gph is too much and it floods badly. So where I inject beer on down is 4 inch. Until the bottom of the marbles I went back to 3 inch. Local muffler shop can't bend 4 inch. I compute ~2300 watts to make 1 gph o...

i wonder both theoretically and observationally, to what extent the injected beer "starts to boil" as it passes through the bottom drain heat exchanger, or is it still a liquid that is raised closer to its boiling temperature. Most of what I read about continuous stills sounds like people ...

No one has ever mentioned the two different sizes of the column. I see the top of the column is slightly narrower than the bottom, at least from the outside. Is this an intentional design feature or just the material you had? What does it tapering down the diameter of the column do? Increase vapor ...

Untitled.png I still don't fully understand how the still we are talking about works. I attempted to draw my understanding based on the video in the very first post. One thing I'm not sure about, is very close to where the mash is injected, there are 2 others hose connections that I don't know what...

Why does it require 80 percent reflux rate? In my continuous still pure water drips into the boiler To get that you need to vaporize an *about* 5x that many MOLS of mostly water at the bottom of the still. Ok, if you are collecting about 1 MOL per hour, 5 MOL per hour must be going up the column. Y...

I thought I had revealed my design??? I've read most of your post history and seen design elements but not a complete design. Your column is slanted rather than vertical. You use marbles for packing. You use a needle valve somewhere :?: You have an electric heating element in the bottom boiler wast...

Smiles....... If you think recursion, http://blog.chrisworfolk.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/hasselhoffian-recursion.gif I only NEED enough heat to vaporize the 2gph of etoh at the top of the packing to get it up to the condenser. Smiles..... OK. THis is how I used to think about it, until Stevea ...

Imagine a different paradigm. I want to believe What if rather than boiling ALL the water repeatedly we inject boiling beer mid point in the column so that ONLY pure water dripped off the bottom of the column into the boiler. OK, BY Injecting "boiling beer", do you mean you are injecting ...

Saltbush Bill wrote: ↑Sun Mar 20, 2022 8:26 pm What is a pot reflux still, its either one or the other imo.

I think he means Pot = Batch reflux still. compared to Continuous Stripping + Rectification Still.

I say this as someone reading his entire post history trying to learn his knowledge.

We've had some disconnects. What does latent heat of vaporization mean to you? To me it means a pound of water requires 3 times as much energy to phase change to vapor as does a pound of etoh. To me, a gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds. A gallon. Of Etioh is about 6 pounds. Does this seem about...

Why would you say this? Because Stevea told me this a few replies up, referencing his graph. *some* amount of reflux is required, i'm not a chemical engineer, but it sounds like Stevea's information is the precise amount of reflux required to get to 95% product from 10% feed. Also you went from 20 ...

My still is continuous. It requires enough reflux to ensure the temperature gradient so the top of the column is colder than the bottom. Any rectification column (of a given height with a given packing) needs the same reflux given mash ABV and given product ABV, whether its batch or continuous feed...

... So the energy cost is, once again, 1110 W / 2.5 gal wash = 444 W-hr per gallon of wash. The still in this thread operates at 20 gph of 10% wash with 3800 watts, or 2000 watt hours for 1 gallon of ethanol, so 200 W-hr per gallon of wash. There doesn't look like theres heat pumps just direct heat...

This is incredible! I'm so interested. I spent months reading everything I could find about small scale ethanol production after the book "Alcohol can be a gas" really captured my imagination. I'm new to this so want to learn from the established experst who are already making it work, and...

I hope that makes sense. If I totally misunderstood what you meant, please correct me. Thank you! I think you got exactly what I'm asking, and the theory behind it. I guess it gets into the more detailed models of heat transfer. aka conduction, convection, radiation, etc. I guess I was imagining a ...

i think this question is mostly general to the theory of packed column distilling. basically, how come in a CM still is the reflux condenser (or dephlegmator or whatever component facilitates a coolant flow that acts as a heatsink) is below the take off port? I see if you have insufficient coolant f...

Thank you I already found so much good info on this site. It seems around 2010 was somewhat of the last golden age for this specific interest. Right after "Alcohol can be a gas!" was published (this is the book that really got me into the idea), a lot of the new closed mailings lists and f...

hello, the last few months i have been very interested in distilling, i have read several books and many articles, blogs, and forums post, many on this website as it seems to have the best combination of knowledgable people and it has a focus on small scale which is what im interested in. where I li...