OK. After much investigation and research on Homedistiller.org... not to forget help from you guys and girls out there... I have a plan.
What I want to do is modify my existing Reflux Still by adding an extension filled with ceramic beads between the lid and the existing column... and here's my plan..
Can anyone spot a flaw in the design or recommend an improvement to it?
The one thing I wasn't sure about was how many times I should loop the copper tube around the outside.
B.T.W. The length of the 40mm pipe is 500mm. The mesh will sit inside the lower reducer to stop the beads falling out.
“Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.”
I have been down this path so here are a couple of ideas. I used a 1 metre column packed with structured copper. I also separated the water flow so I could independently control the flow to the cooling jacket and the product condenser. I also packed the SS head 'column' with mesh. For controllable reflux you will also need to cut down the power for the run to about 700W.
Looking at the run records I see I managed to get 90-94% but you will only get up there with the power reduction and slow output.
Other comments.
It is NEVER a good idea to put cooling tubes through the middle of a reflux column. It can only completely upset the reflux column's action.
You don't need the copper coil around the extension as it is duplicating the action of the cooling jacket you already have in the SS head.
Think carefully about cutting your losses and chucking the SS head away and building a simple VM or LM reflux column. That way you will be happier with the result and saved yourself the time and expense of trying to flog a deadish horse.
Mine works, and the idea of the cooling rod is to cool the beads in the column to add another reflux in the column itself, between one rod and the rod beneeth it. It alows only the lighter alcohols to pass and the better ones, with double refluxing the heavier alcohols. You can do with out the extra cooling, and run heaps more water(80L cwith 200L with out)aprox figures, Either ring it to cool or rod id, my friend and I have had nothing but good results through trial and error with cooling rods v's cooling rings or jackets. But with temp control @ around 700w you can forget about what i'm talking about.
REMEMBER THEY MAKE SIMILAR TO THESE COMMERCIALLY, THEYE WOULDNT IF DIDNT WORK
And dont go making a tall big column(or sky scrapper) if you can pull the same product from your SSpirits + your design column.
Last edited by pipe_cleanner on Mon Mar 06, 2006 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
More cooling with my rods, Might not add more percent(over 93%) but will reduce the amount of cooling water I have to use. And if I have and Rod problems, I can disconect 1 to 2 rods with out upseting to much.
I hate to say it, but pipecleaner, you don't fully understand the theory of a reflux column. This isn't a flame, it's science
You cannot selectively condense lighter and heavier alcohols on a cold rod. You can only condense "the mix" of whatever the vapor content is at that point.
The point of cooling the top of your reflux column is to create a temperature gradient between the top and bottom of the column. You are not so much sending impure vapor back to be reprocessed, as you are sending back near-boiling liquid to cool the top of the column to that temperature. It creates a feedback loop where the top of the column stabilizes at the temperature of the coolest vapor available there (purest ethanol your column can produce).
Putting through tubes in a column disrupts the equilibrium and will in fact hurt performance. Not only are you disrupting the equilibrium and turning your column into two or more smaller ones, you are sucking useful heat out and pouring it down the drain!
I have read that SS owners in fact can often get increased performance by disabling the lower cooling tubes - which are often just above the boiler! All these super-low tubes do is waste power that should be travelling up the column.
An addition. If you need to kill power, you can put your through tubes at the base of the column. This will control the power without upsetting the reflux action going on in the column.
To be honest, if pipe_cleaner has turned a 70% yield into a 95% yield... that's good enough for me. I'm still trying to get a handle on the whole reflux, plates thing, and was really after any ideas that have been tried and work. Thanks for the lead pipe_cleaner.
“Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.”
I have found that a slower rate of off-take will not only result in a higher percentage of ABV, but more importantly, much cleaner cuts.
Especially with a sugar wash where there seems to be a lot of aromatic heads that get into everything. Your ABV alone won't tell you how much cogener you have in your product.
I am finding that this distilling thing takes a lot of patience. Mike Nixon recommends a head stabilization period of 4 hours and a total run time of 24 hours. That will result in a very pure product.
My runs aren't quite that long, but neither are they that pure. More time equals more purity. I'm collecting a quart about every 2.5 to 3 hours.
