THE LAVA ROCK USAGE POST

[MereCashmere]

Bit of a tongue in cheek title; I found when researching packing there were a lot of posts and info for lava for 2” columns and not so much for 3” columns, so I’m hoping this at least helps one of you out.

Lava Rock

Here’s some things I’ve learned running lava rock. Feel free to post your questions here and me or someone else can answer them.

3”x36” CCVM
5500 watt element
Semi flooded state at 3500 watts +\-

I’m able to pull from a full keg charge of an 8-10% wash roughly a gallon to 1.5 gallons of azeo (95.6) or better (that comes back down to azeo with a nights rest) the whole run. Fastest I like to pull product is 3 liters an hour, but I can pull azeo+ at about 4 an hour, I just have to baby my rig more at that speed since the phase changes occur more rapidly.

1. For a three inch column, im using rocks the size (not necessarily the shape) of about two raisins. This meant buying 50 pounds of rock, sorting through it, and returning what I didn’t use. If you’re like me, sieves and screens won’t work; some rocks are big but flat as a coin; some are small and thin; I opted to hand pick my rocks. Time consuming, but it gives me piece of mind knowing they’re uniform. I bought these; American Fireglass LAVA-S-10...
2. I learned quickly that the less mesh I used, the better. I choked my column recently with a three inch roll of copper from being too packed down as the filter at the bottom of my column. Now I use one single scrubby on top of a perforated plate (think as little metal as possible to hold the scrubby)to make sure the lava doesn’t fall into the boiler.
3. The tails smell trapped in the lava doesn’t effect my final product. I rinse my lava in warm water and dry it and that’s all.
4. You want to find out how to drive your rig to maintain a semi flooded state. This means for me, 1 cm +\- fluid bed on the top of my packing while I’m drawing off my product@ 3500 watts in the beginning, and by the end I’m at about 4300 watts.
5. I use black lava; see Amazon link above. I have not used red.

Any more I think of I’ll post here.