Home Distiller

I see many opinions about liebig condensers and how to aid in turbulence. I also see many diehard shotgun condenser fans. Since I am just cooling product coming off an LM I really don't need much but I was in the mood to tinker around a bit and thought I would make a shotgun-liebig......

I had some 1/4" soft tube that I cut into 3 22" lengths. I crammed them into a piece of 1/2 inch pipe and soldered up the gaps so that it was solid. Then I took my dremel and smoothed everything out to be cup shaped. I did this to each end then twisted them together. Then I added some 1/2" to each end slipped it into a 24" piece of 3/4" with the appropriate reducer fittings to make a regular looking liebig. Was all this necessary? No. But it was kinda cool to do. I won't be using it for a while. I need to get cracking on a new build but am taking my time on it.

I would call it under kill. With 1/4" tubing. Looks cool though.

Looks cool mate , isn't it just s shotgun though?, liebig= single tube, shotgun=multi?. I did one sort of like yours but never tried it, wish I had!. I'd really like to try one your size.mi

Turbulens is required for cooling water to remove "heat blanket" from hot pipe. For vapor path straight pipe is desirable to prevent pooling.
And 1/4 pipes looks too small for me either. Did you try it? Could you measure how much power it can knock down?

Prairiepiss wrote:I would call it under kill. With 1/4" tubing. Looks cool though.

Yea, I meant overkill on the effort for return. I figured 3 pieces of 1/4" tube will give enough flow. I was just goofing around in the garage and wanted to build something.

You said this was intended for cooling LM output? Should be fine. Looks good, too.

a little overkill ... your half inch into 3 pieces of 1/4" (now 3/4" right?) 1) does not give enough coolant flow thru the 3/4" outter tube and 2) the twisting prevents probably about (guessing) 1/4 of each of the tubes to be without water contact (thus remaining hot)

to think outloud, interesting concept (as long as it is always run in the vertical due to pooling), but I would use the same 3 tube config, but with a 1" to 1.25" outter tube to allow more water flow, and somehow introduce spacing between the tubes (simple flat blade screwdriver prying them back apart?) to allow some water to flow between the inner portions of the pipes. If you do that, I suspect that you could shorten the length from 24" to probably about 18" or so, since in essence you have a 24" tube, just coiled/curved

I would presume it's 1/2", because only 2 1/4" pieces are touching inline at a time?, giving 1/2" external coolent area over the entire outer edges?. Same as a 3/4" over 1/2". But this one has more internal heat due to more copper'

All three pieces of 1/4" in a triangle fit in a 1/2" pipe with a little coaxing, you can see this in the first picture. This then easily fit in a 3/4" with plenty of room for circulation. As was pointed out it can only be used verticle due to pooling. I am just using it to cool the output from an LM so I don't know what it would knock down. If it works, great! If not, I have a tried and proven one too.

Ways to improve shotgun heat exchanger efficiency