Home Distiller

I am pulling my cooling water directly from a shower mixing battery. Today I forgot to make sure that the mixer dial was all the way to the blue side, and our hot water tank emptied into my cooling water. So when the wife woke up after a lazy saturday morning and was about to take a shower, there was no hot water, the shower was freezing cold.

So the wife did as wives do... she yelled for me, shrieking. And I cam running up from the lab thinking a mad axe murderer is coming through the wall, or a spider or something.

I come up and do some preliminary ho hum ho hum. And since I can't admit that it is the still that has eaten all the hot water, I have to go looking around in the fuse boxes, and I proclaimed that the fuses had blown and she had to wait for the tank to heat up again.

It didn't help. It was of course my fault her day was ruined. But at least she hasn't veto'ed my hobby yet.

Smooth

um... yeah... but it's a gas heater.

hahaha I love it

Nice save!

HDNB wrote:um... yeah... but it's a gas heater.

REALLY smooth!

Geoff

I have now removed the shower mixer to avoid future mishaps. Instead I have installed a valve on each of the hot and cold water pipes. Doesn't look like much but now there is no chance that hot water will leak out in the cooling water.

Nice one !

Did you lose much booze ?

No. The booze is safe. Originally I extracted 9.5 litres of pure 96% into 20 cut bottles from my 23 litres of low wines. Then I had to shut down the still for a while while I figured out a way to blame the shortage of hot water on something else before I added my feints jar to the boiler and ran to the end. This resultet in another 3 liters of azeotrope. Of the original run I saved 7.5 litres. From the tail-run with added feints I discarded the first litre, but I am still undecided about the last two bottles. Originally I meant for this to become technical spirit, but the quality is so good, that I might end up keeping it in the "good enough for flavoured vodka" category.
Here is 7.5l of good stuff +2l of stuff I will decide on after a few days of airing out. After I have combined two and two cuts into full bottles, and ditched the 2 first liters as heads.
The heads and the rest is in the technical spirits locker, used for cleaning and starting fires.


I am however starting to see why not everyone are running fractioning columns all the time, even for neutrals. This run was started 0900 and ended 19:30. Thats a lot of hours bubbling along in the lab. In potstill mode I could have run everything through twice in that time, if not more.

Too bad you couldn’t use the product condenser coolant water outlet to fill her a nice hot bathtub....you’d have been the knight in shining armour.

Got lemons.....make lemonade.
ss

still_stirrin wrote:Too bad you couldn’t use the product condenser coolant water outlet to fill her a nice hot bathtub....you’d have been the knight in shining armour.

Got lemons.....make lemonade.
ss

Got lemons.....make lemoncello.