Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

I don't know, and that is not what I am asking.
The Honda takes far to long to heat up and costs too much in petrol. I am off grid and do not have mains power. Solar want work.
How best do i monitor the temperature when i am distilling with gas

sorry mate was trying to help you. if the heating element is underpowered it wont matter how much power the generator 'can' generate. A better heating element would have likely solved your problem and would have been the cheaper option.
Anway, back to gas heating.

How best do i monitor the temperature when i am distilling with gas

Most people would plumb a thermoprobe to the boiler measuring the temperature of the wash.

he idea is to use the 4ring gas burner to heat up and then turn it down to 2 ring ?

yes, but turning it down by how much will be determined by many factors, like boiler insulation, column, etc. so you gotta play around with your setup. I am not sure how easy it is to tell when a T500 is flooding... but if it does, or wash keeps coming out your parrot, then you got too much power...

cheers, rs

Thank you, I will plumb a temp probe to the boiler.

There is absolutely no need to know what the temperature is.

Zak Griffin wrote:There is absolutely no need to know what the temperature is.

The probe in the boiler was one of my better choices

For me its not about the temp,its about the rate of boil wich matters,1000wt will boil at the same temp as a 2000wt but you will have nearly twice as much vapour heading up ya still and it will be a rapid boil compared ta a soft roiling boil of the 1000wt,in short the temp of boiler is not preportional to the amount of vapour exiting it ,the amount of power you apply determines that.cheers hillzabilly ;-)

agree hillzabily and I am sure thats what Zak is getting at. But for monitoring the heat-up phase I find it quite useful and thats what Beaull was after ?

Been thinking is there a safe way to use gas and electricity at same time ? Blast it with gas till nearly producing switch off gas collect on electricity..

It seems that all of you trying to help me are "pot stillers"
Is there anyone out there using a reflux still with gas, and if so how do you regulate your system.

The same as you would running electricity mate. You don't, as a rule, control a reflux still by the amount of power you throw at it.

If it takes 2 hours to heat 20 liters by generator then its not putting out full power because have still spirits with 1380 watts element and takes one and half hour to heat 25 liters .

You don't, as a rule, control a reflux still by the amount of power you throw at it.

Sorry Zak, not sure where this rule is coming from, but as correctly stated by hillzabilly, controlling the power will allow you to control the rate of vapourization and therefore important parameters such as reflux ratio (the ratio between liquid returned to the boiler and the amount of vapour making it past the RC, or takeoff). Controlling both heating power and RC cooling gives you more flexibility to change this ratio.

http://moonshinedistiller.com/blog/controlling-your-heat-and-boiler-temperature-vs-vaporization/

cheers RS

Ok, I have done the first batch.
It turns out I have a low pressure regulator with my 4 ring (Rambo ) burner.
I filled the boiler with 20 liters of wash. and fired up all four rings.
Approx 30 minutes the T500 column was getting warm.
The cooling water was running strong. I turned off 3 rings on the boiler.
Nothing much happened for a while, the temp gauge on the T500 showed 25c.
I turned on another ring on the boiler and the temp went up to 32c with some drips.
after 15 minutes and the temp not moving above 36C I opened up another ring ( now 3)
after another 30 minutes temp at T500 now is at 60C steadily increasing, and flow of continuous alcohol at 90% 2litres so far, more to come

I am happy with that

thank you everyone for your support and advise.
beaull

Just from the experience of running my boka on gas I can say the way I run is having all rings at full bore and cooling water pumping, until I can feel heat about 1/2 way up the column. As soon as that happens I drop it down to maybe 3/4 power so I don't get too much heat into it. I then leave it at that until my thermo comes up to the expected temp, which on my still is 78.6°C, at which point I turn the heat down fairly low and adjust the cooling water so that all the vapour is knocked down but the output is quite warm. Obviously might work a little different for a T500 but for me I find so long as you keep your eyes on it it's pretty easy to gauge when to reduce heat.

Do you have solar would think you could use solar dc to heat up bypassing the inverter but would be limited to limited hours of operation when the sun is available.

I purchased a 4 ring gas burner (rambo) however it came with a low pressure regulator, and is a bit tame
Can I fit a high pressure regulator to this burner for more heat.

You should be able to mate but obviously if the low pressure reg is integrated into the line of the burner it would need to be removed, preferably by a professional, and the new one fitted. If the regulator is a separate piece to the burner then it would be as easy as removing it and adding the high pressure reg.

Is there a prohibition of using high pressure reg at a domestic residence that may be why its low pressure.

wynnum1 wrote:Is there a prohibition of using high pressure reg at a domestic residence that may be why its low pressure.

I'm pretty beaull is talking about a portable gas burner that ethier comes with a standard regulator or a HP regulator . Not sure where prohibition comes into play , it will either come with approved Australia standards or not in some cases if you import one from USA.
If you can buy it off the shelf here it will be Australian standards approved as it's illegal to sell them otherwise. :handgestures-thumbupleft: