Getting so close to finishing and having a few issues got under my skin. Wasn’t gunna walk away and stew on it overnight. Rinsed all components, put the rig back together and got started on fixing the problems. The leaking seal wasn’t an issue when I reassembled the rig, I took a bit more time and made sure they were accurately placed. That worked as they should on the sac run. Bogged up the broken glass with a blob of silicone on the outside of the crack. Thought it would go off during the heat up (which it did) Took some of the weight off the dangling hoses by trying them up with a bit of bungee cord.
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That even worked a treat.
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This modification allowed the RC adjuster to work as intended. Gee I got lucky. Doesn’t always work out that way.
Time for the sac run. Put about 16 litres of 30% into the boiler. Shitty old heads, tails and some foreshots. Fired the girl up and within about 30 minutes she was on the boil. RC Al, you were on the money when you said early in the build that my condenser may not be far enough down below the tee to be fully effective. I started getting a slow drip out from the PC. So that was well spotted. I can cut a bit off the open tube if I need to but there wasn’t much product coming out so I will see if I need to after a few runs. I was also running at 2400W at the time so this may have contributed to this. During the vinegar run, I played a bit with water settings. Decided to start with 1 litre per minute on the RC supply and 2 litres per minute on the PC. After being in full reflux for about 5 minutes, I decided to start taking some product off. Opened the RC one notch and watched what happened. I started getting a good stream of ethanol coming out the spout. Thought it was coming out too quickly but I wanted to see abv and product temps at that rate.
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Wow. I was stoked with that. Talk about lucky. For the next jar, I turned the power down to about 1800W. Ended up with a skinny, slow stream. The PC did an amazing job. Knocked the vapour down and kept the temp consistent throughout the run.
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Checked the next couple of jars and the abv remained consistent.
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No complaints about that. It was starting to get close to dark so I opened her up and got her cranking. Pulled 400mil in 6 minutes (accurately timed and measured) did this for a couple of jars and noticed that the temp had risen to 20 degrees and the abv had dropped to 93%. Checked the waste water temp from the RC. It was warm but no where near the temp that my Pure Distilling reflux would get to. Looks like the coil did a great job. Very pleased with the result after an ordinary start.
Cheers
Les
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