Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Dominator wrote:Crow, the BTUs of your burner can be roughly calculated by using some simple measurements and the equations supplied.
So say you put 10L of water in your boiler at 20oC then run your burner flat out until the water boils an it takes 10mins

Umm even re reading I guess I misunderstand the question , I figured you were trying to calculate the boil up time If the energy is an unknown fact and of cause the boil up time is because that is in fact what you are trying to calculate then I can't see how this could be worked out by these equations. If you knew the boil up time was 10 min then you would in fact be wasting time trying to calculate it. Kinda reminds me of Vic B,D & M " ok so you want a copy of a birth certificate fine just make sure you send in photo ID accompanied with a birth certificate :wtf: :angry-banghead:

Maybe I have read this thread wrong. I thought it was comparing how different setups worked. I was thinking if you timed how long it took to boil up the. You could calculate how much energy your particular heating method is putting into your boiler so you can compare the way different stills operate without the heating method being such a variable.

I think I am lost. ;)

You're on the money Dom, the idea is:
1. Time how long it takes to increase 10L of water from one temperature to another
2. Do some magic maths
3. Work out how much power your burner/element is putting into the water

You can check your birth certificate if that helps.

Ok third read though coupled with that explanation and I see your aim :handgestures-thumbupleft: , I'll just crawl back under this rock then :oops: PS fucked up thread title for it btw EG Very misleading

blond.chap wrote:(4.18 is the amount of heat (in kJ) required to heat 1L of water up by 1°C).

A Joule, or calorie is a unit used to measure work. Both for electric and gas, yes?
It would be very handy to be able to back calculate the output of a burner or element at a given setting (allowing for losses/adjustments) and although it wouldnt be theoreticly perfect given that the losses for each burner/boiler differ, it would give a damn close approxamation.
Even if the calculation wasn't perfectly accurate, if it was measured the same on two said boilers, it would be consistant.
If someone bought a still from another member (yes I do sell some, so I am interested in this), the seller could give a "10 litre time" that the still performed best at, then the seller could do a 10 litre time and adjust the input of their bolier to closly match.
Columns prefer to run at a given heat/vapor speed, pots seem more flexable. Bokas and plated column owners sometimes have a hard time finding the initial best setting. Might help this a bit, even given the inacuracies

A joule is a measure of energy. Regardless of the source, be it heat (gas, electric), food etc.

Yes, 4.18kj is the required energy to heat or cool 1L of pure water 1oC at sea level.

Like you said it will not be perfect, but it will give good figure for people to compare with.

In theory its a good idea Empty, the problem I see is the surface area being heated or doing the heating, not all kegs or elements are equal.

"In theory there is no diference between practice and theory,
in practice there is"

Quote from my old man.

You are right SBB, but I'm running with the theory that most guys use a vessel that represents a keg shaped item in height and diameter. There is a handfull of specialty boilers and custom made ones, they are impressive, but there's not a heap of them being used on our level.
And I'm thinking it might be nothing more than a handy reference tool.

I dunno, maybe there's already an app for it ;-)

WineGlass wrote:There is a handfull of specialty boilers and custom made ones, they are impressive, but there's not a heap of them being used on our level.

If it's the ones I'm thinking of they're hardly custom, just search alibaba ;-)

For truly custom boilers keep an eye on my commercial section over coming weeks :D

EG lemme elaborate a little, had a couple of rums so could be dribbling here. In short i think its a great idea, Ive often thought about how to equate electric to gas power, watts or amps to BTU, and heat up times. What i was getting at is that I have two different 50L kegs that Ive used as boilers at different times, one is taller and skinnier than the other, hence less surface area to collect heat then transfer that heat to the wash in the keg/ boiler.
The difference in heat up time between those two kegs/boilers, using the same gas ring and regulator set up is on average 12-14 minutes when the boilers are charged with a 40L wash.
Crux of it is unless you have the same burners, same regs , same diameter keg ya got problems.
Or maybe I just misread the first post and have it all wrong :eusa-think: :eusa-think:

blond.chap wrote:If we can settle on a good standard approach it may be worth putting up a calculator (I can't upload excel), where you just enter in temperature change and time taken to give an output of "effective heat input",

My thoughts exactly blonde. If you or someone can do up a spread sheet, you can email it to Stig. He can then upload it to the server :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Alot here would use cub or similar shape size keg here wouldn't they?. It will be hard to get a precise measurement because like you say sbb lots of kegs are different, some have sight windows, some have the rim cut away some have drains ect it will all influence the way and time it heats up. Surely we could get enough people with close to standard kegs and get an estimate and compare the different keg heat up times to a collective result. And I havnt had a drink yet :teasing-neener: :laughing-rolling:

If I am interpreting EG basis for this correctly I don't think it will matter what type of keg, heater or modifications you have got. The different types will just result in a larger database, which I can only see as a positive outcome.
I believe EGs point is to calculate how much heat your particular setup puts into your boiler. That way you can you can more accurately work out what boiler set up will work with a particular still.

I see this as a great way to help noobs when they ask things like, 'What size still can I run on this boiler?' Or 'I only get .5 Ltrs per hour, is my element/burner too small?' Etc.

I guess to me its more about replication than calculation. I think as said, it would be very hard to accuratly back calculate the BTU's that a particulat burner puts out, given all the variables. But you could get close.
I know when I run my burner on close to maximum, there is that much heat escaping out the sides that the calculation would have to be flawed, but if it took 4 minutes to boil 10 litres, I know that its way different to running one ring and taking 10 mins for 10 litres.

Good point you make SBB on the tooheys,castlemain or cub,powers keg, there is a notable difference between them.

Dominator wrote:I see this as a great way to help noobs when they ask things like, 'What size still can I run on this boiler?' Or 'I only get .5 Ltrs per hour, is my element/burner too small?' Etc.

I guess thats what its more about. If someone said, I'm using all of a 3 ring burner and my boka dosnt seem to be working, or I'm using a bd747 and my pot keeps puking, then this might be able to help.

This whole thing seems redundant to me :?

You are all talking about a burner at full noise. I don't really care how much my burner is putting out to get it to boil, I care more about how much power i'm throwing at it when I am taking product.

Now how the fuck are you going to map how much "power" i am generating at any gas setting on my reg? :think:

You gonna do your 10 minute boil for every tiny increment on my reg? and then try to take in all the other variables?

Dont think so :wtf:

You're right sam, its pretty useless for an existing, well run still like yours.
But I'm guessing you got 2 main settings, maybe 3, those being heat up, strip and spirit for the old pot, maybe 2 settings for the bubbler, I dunno.
But if you were interested, you could boil up 10 litres at the settings you use and time it. You would have to repeat the process for each heat setting you wanted to "calibrate", or give a time to. Then if you decided to update to one of those fancy screw on sightglass ones, you could pass this info on with the old still, helping the guy that buys it.

The idea's only so useful.

Because my reg is fairly cheap it is quite fiddly to adjust settings, the burner is great to get to boil but once your there it's only tiny adjustments necessary and without a pressure gauge I would have to remember how big the flame is and how much power that was producing.

Would be near impossible to tell the flame difference between say 3000 and 2800 watts.

Maybe one day if I buy a decent reg.

At the moment it's going to stay in my too hard basket, this does highlight one of the advantages of elements with a power controller

Oh yeah and the bubbler is by no means "well run" by me yet, it hasn't even had a "proper" run in my eyes yet but I'm working on that

Ok, I knocked up a calculator spreadsheet for this today. It will work out:
- Work out the "effective heat input" of your system (electric or gas with a given pressure setting)
- How effective your insulation is (electric only)
- An estimation of how long it will take a wash to boil (given %alc, volume heat input and starting temp)

I also did a quick trial of my boiler, from 16degC up to 97degC (when it started evaporating too much water), the calculator spat out that I was getting 2.063kW contributing to temperature increase. So with my 2.4kW element, that's 14% lost. I'll do another one some time soon to work out what difference insulating the boiler does.

The heat up time was actually pretty accurate, I put in 2.4kW with no heat loss as a guess and it said it'd take 58 minutes, actually took 66. So incorporating the error you should be able to get it pretty accurate.

I've asked the Stig to put up the calculator so people can have a look and a play.

Shit hot Blondy.
It will be interesting to see how well it does back calculating a burner output. I reckon if it can give an idea of the losses (2.063kw actual V's 2.4kw rated consuption) those losses could be chased and hunted down like varmints.

With a real world calculator you could work out if a change was an improvement and by how much. And like you say, great for working out efficencies in insulation on an electric pwered boiler.

Good work mate, can't wait till the stig gets it up.
Sorry stig, thats not what I meant.
Cant wait till the stig gets it uploaded. :handgestures-thumbupleft: