Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Thanks busman,
The price is not my main concern, I am more worried about all the extra problems with going to 4" that will affect the quality of the product. The only real reason I want to go to 4" is to be able to do a reflux run of 45L of low wines in fuck all time, but if people are getting over 5L an hour in hearts with a 3" thats got to be better than what I am running now.

I agree with busman, build it ;)

Only thing I would do is forget the packing and run perforated plates in it, they would never need to be removed & negate the need for centering devices too.

A 4" VM with 15 sight glasses sure would look cool sitting on a 150L boiler :mrgreen:

:laughing-rolling: I don't know nearly enough about plates to go down that track, seems to me I might go the 3" and if im not happy with the output I will try the 4" later on, im young enough to get a few more builds out of me :D

45L through a 4" would hardly be worth while I'd imagine, but there are a few members here that would be willing to help out with plate configuration ;)

Yeah was thinking that as well, 90% mind made up for the 3" (the 8" plate can wait :D )

I've got up to 5l/h on my 3" VM. Performance lately is down around 4l/h and i'm yet to figure out why.

Even still it turns a 14 hr day for 2" into an 8 or so hour day.

The packing problems once you get above 3" is the reason why no-one i know of has a working 4" packed column. ;)

Is it the cost of the packing, or the odds of it compressing mid-run that is the limiting factor? Could you use something else instead? I recall Riku mentioning on another forum a stainless product he used for packing that was quite unlike the mesh or scrubbers that almost everyone else uses, I'll try and find out what it was. Just for shits and giggles, I'm not actually considering building one...

It's both.

You'd be thinking of spp, maybe the second most expensive packing there is.

The compression would not be a facot with spp, but channeling may well.

One day someone will build one, the best thing to do would be to work out how to do it before throwing money at it. 8-)

you could maybe use a "plate / packing tree" type system to hold thew packing and reduce the compression .

not sure how much gap between sections so you dont get compression and gaps in the column ?

the 3" boka i am slowly working on looks like it's going to take a lot of scrubbers to fill
even crossed my mind to do a bottom section of copper packing in it at the start of the column

4" would look massive !!

maheel wrote:you could maybe use a "plate / packing tree"

Ive been wondering a similar thing Maheel.....a sort of hybrid.....plates and packing......the plates would take the weight and stop the mesh compacting...even in a 3 inch.

4" scrubber packed VM/RLM combo will sit on top of a 120L Fester boiler. Never had a chance to collect from it yet but it took 5500 watts on a cleaning run without centering devices. Be April or May before I get back onto this project I'm thinking.

Mini I hope you covered that thing with tin foil :text-lol:

eminiM wrote:4" scrubber packed VM/RLM c

lol before i read the post i looked at the pic and thought NEEDS A BIGGER BOILER !!! lol

thats massive :shifty:

Ha! Thats fantastic mini, if you ever got rumbled you could shim up it and escape over the roof :D