Home Distiller

A friend of mine ran his flute this weekend and the thing caught on fire. He uses a propane burner, PA4 banjo on a stainless 15.5 gal beer keg. The flute is a 4" home made of sanitary tees with copper plates with the spill off at 3". 5 plates high on the tower. The run was doing fine and was going at 170 proof then the parrot juice just suck down back into the flute and came back up, the fire started at the parrot and then spread to the rest of the tower. Now I know the level for the spill off is a little high for a flute and this is something we are trying on a new design for the flute and wonder if this had something to do with the fire? He has run flutes before with 1" spill over and never had a problem with it. This was the 2nd time he ran this design, this 1st ran with no problems, then the 2nd was flames. Any advice? I have search the forum for such problems and came up empty! I just do not know why the thing would suck the juice back up the tower and the spit it back out. If you need more info, let me know and I will supply it!

By spill I presume you mean the bath depth?, 3" sounds pretty high. He might have had big flooding in the column, and then its puked big time. When the distillate came back into the parrot did it over flow or come rushing into the parrot?. Did the downcomers look they were doing the job properly?. Deeper baths on the plates will create additional heat into the column also, don't know if that would cause any probs. I'm no expert at all, I'm sure someone will know, good luck.

Yes on the bath depth was 3" and the down comer look like they were working ok. Now as for the parrot refilling, I do not know if it rush out or slowly refill, I'll have to as him as he was standing over it taking a pic when this happen! Scared the crap out of him when it lit up! One the 1st run of this design I was there and the plates fill up nicely, but the 1st thing I did notice was this, when you added more water to the defag, it would knock down the top plate right now where with the 1" down flow I had never seen it do that quick before!

googe wrote:Deeper baths on the plates will create additional heat into the column also

Hmmm?
Hi googe,
Look at it rather like this, the first job of the liquid on the plate is to condense incoming vapor. So the liquid on the plate is a condenser,,,,,in essence a heat ex changer. And the deeper fluid bed will have more capacitance to cope with what will become unneeded heat being dis carded by the boiler..

However the deeper liquid bed will create more back pressure and if the plates are brought into a flooded condition the back pressure can make the system really overwhelm the parrot with some pretty high proof liquid...has happened to me several times while running too hard and will scare the day lights out of you with my system cuz it will force you to scramble to change jars and kill the heat way too fast for comfort. Fortunately for me I do not use an open flame.

A secondary drain pan / catch basin would be helpful?

Did I read this correctly:

The flute sucked the contents out of the parrot?

This suggests that the parrot is directly connected to the output and you did not fit an atmospheric vent between the parrot and the product end of the condenser. This is a bad oversight.

Please clarify.

+1 both LWTCS and Myles.

Deeper liquid bed will block the heat to the column.

And does sound as if there isn't a vent for the parrot.

Cane get some pictures of the still. So we know what we are looking at?

The parrot is vented, but now I see that it needs to be bigger. So it will be change. The discharge is a 1/2" and the vent is way smaller than that! Will change it to 1/2" also! I did found out that it came back it spray out of the parrot and that is how it caught fire!

Thanks for clarifying that LWTCS. I had the same issue when I first ran my bubbler, to much heat and flooded it and about 500ml came gushing out in a split second, scared the crap out of me!. I reckon that's what's happened by the sound of the spray out of the parrot.

Ain't electric great. It may not stop the still from puking but at least the possibility of things catching on fire are reduced drastically.

Made up new parrot for him 1/2" down tube with 1/2" vent to 1" tester tube. This should take care of the suction problem. Going to cut the level tubes down to 1" except the top one, I'm going to leave it the way it is to see if his proof stays up!