For the past 4 years i have been running a 2" boka that I built myself, it has done its job well, but it was never perfect. The condenser coil that I wound is a double wound 1/4" copper about 9" long, it's not long enough and I only run the still low and slow, or i get vapor starting to come out of my vent hole regardless of how much flow I put thru the coil. Not such a bad thing as i get flavorful high proof likker, but it takes me about 10-12 hours sometimes to get a gallon and a half of spirits (including heads which I don't put into the final product) and a half gallon of tails. I do refrigeration so I sometimes have access to waste copper that I can take for free, well today I got me a nice 24" section of 4" copper pipe!!
My intent is to build another boka still as it is very compact, I rarely if ever do reflux runs, so I don't mind it being short and I can always add a section of pipe underneath it to add height in the future if I want to do a reflux run, I have read people saying that at 4" a boka can be unreliable when doing reflux runs, due to the column being so wide and possible channeling or running down the walls occurring instead of the distillate going down the center. So I may just stick to the 2" for that.
Anyways, my question to the HD community is, should I build another boka? Or another type of still?
I plan on winding another coil for it, this time since I've got the space in the column, I plan on running a cold finger(3/4" or 1") and winding two separate coils out of 3/8" soft copper (one inner and one outter) this time I want to make the condensing coil 12" long so that I don't have any vapor escaping out of my vent hole, using 3/8" instead of 1/4" to provide more flow capability over surface area.
Is this good thinking?
I can get 1/4" tubing no problem and wind two double coils, I am just worried about back pressure. I use house water pressure not a recirculating aquarium pump so maybe I wouldn't need to worry too much about back pressure? I have very high water pressure (almost 100psi at my RODI inlet pressure gauge). So I guess I just wanted to bounce some ideas off the community and see if my thinking is sound. Any help/input would be greatly appreciated, when I start the build I will take pictures and post progress in another thread as well for anyone interested in following along or using my ideas or designs!
-Z
Building anew still for my 13G kettle
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