drum heater

[brewmaster2014]

Does anyone try the industrial orange drum heaters to heat the still? Can find them on eBay quite inexpensive.

[Dieseltu]

Im interested in trying it. But 55 gal barrel talk isn't allowed on the site. I can tell you from experience, because we use them at work to heat grease. That they get very hot. You cant touch them. They go to over 300F. And they vary from 300 to 1500 watts. And they can have thermostats. I think they would work. I've never seen one burned up either. Even highly abused. Furthermore you could use one and light a fire under a barrel to get it up to temps then shut the fire off at 175 ish.

[MitchyBourbon]

Do they cycle power on and off? If so, it won't work well for distillation. You will need to find a way to disable the cycling and wire it to a controller. Left as is it might make a good mash tun.

[Dieseltu]

im not sure if they cycle on and off or stay constant. And the controller is sealed unit. But it might be a variable circular resistor based, then it would be ok. However after some thread reading and searching the net. I just now understand now , why it has to be adjustable. To distill. And not on and off. Here in the states , we use an adjustable router speed control , for a hand held router , or AC motor speed control, or a fan speed control. Its quite easy to make one from a house light rheostat switch and extension cord. Because they are 15-20 amps. I'm also quite experienced with electricity. So I got it. Whoo!!

[DeepSouth]

I actually made a post several months ago about trying to use one. I wasn't going to use an off the shelf drum heater however, but a custom sized one made for a keg boiler. The heating pad would wrap around the circumference of the keg and almost completely cover the entire surface. We've used them on my job for various things before, and we usually had custom sizes made. There are several companies that make custom silicone rubber resistive heaters. I had the idea of having a custom one built to be 16"x48" and have a watt density of 7.5 W/in^2 so the whole heating pad would be 5760 W. It would run on 240 V and you could control it just like you do with a controller for any other internal element. Wrap a layer of insulation around the outside and you might be able to distill grain in mash without scorching since the heat would be distributed over a much larger area. For reference, the heating pad I was proposing would be 7.5 W/in^2 versus an 50 W/in^2 for the best water heater element. Based on prices that we've bought them for at my job, I estimated less than $200 for a heater of that size. I never pursued it, but I know it work for running a still. Whether it would be low enough watt density to keep from scorching grain in mash is yet to be known. I probably could sit down and calculate the surface temperature of the inside surface of the keg and determine whether or not it would scorch.