by skurvy84 » Tue Jul 31, 2018 1:24 am
How did i not see your post warra?
If your in kal, it was minesite recycling im pretty sure in boulder on oroya street. They've still got heaps of them easily 2 or 3 pallets full last time i drive past after going to the brewery.
So i had a sparky friend make a little power controller, he went over board and its got a cooling fan and rated to 4000w but its missing a meter to tell me what power its running, i think i worked around that with a simple Arlec power meter (the kind that plugs into the wall than you plug whatever device into the front of it and it disolays the amps, volts, watts etc and can give cost on run time if you bother to figure it out) its overkill but will never see 4000w given that once i get the keg boiler going its only going to have a 2200 element to control but its safe and over rated for its application which suits me.
Stripped 3 ffv's on the detuned super reflux and ran them last night on the pure distilling unit. That was my first mistake started at 530pm and didnt finish till 4am oh well. So my 3 stripped washes went in @35% all up once watered down and total volume in the boiler was 23ish litres. Waited for it to come up to temp then started fiddling with the power controller. I did have my first drop of fores come through when the thermocouple read 55 and it slowly built up more to 2-3 drops a second I wanted to try and sit the rising vapour temp as close as i could to around 72-73 degrees c in an effort to compress fores and heads and i think it worked very well i took 3x200ml of fores and boy are they some nasty stuff i haven't smelt anything like that before.
I decided that this seemed to have worked pretty well and i tried to let the temp sit right there for pretty much the entire run, but it wanted to sit comfortably at 76-79 with the 5 -6 drops every second. I did ignore the instructions at this point because it says to open the take off valve to "fast mode", but each previous run when ive following them the temp jumps way up to 85 and stays there, raise 2 degrees and then your meant to close it back to "slow mode" and keep collecting. So instead of opening the valve i left the valve approx 3rd closed the entire time collecting a very fine toothpick like stream until i noticed significant change in flavour and than opened it to fast, which gave me a stream of tails for a few minutes and the temp eventually climbed to 85.5 degrees and i started to notice tails coming stronger and called it quits.
i collect cuts in 200ml jars and all up i collected 18 cuts jars all which smell like nothing with the exception of the first one and last 2 which are a little funky.
Now heres where i feel like some things amiss, im very happy with the compression of fores/heads, but using some of the calcs available i apparently should have been able to collect 7ltrs at 95% abv from that boiler charge, i only collected 600ml fores/heads and 3litres of "hearts" ( well ill call it hearts its the cleanest most neutral thing ive ever made) at @92% and didnt collect tails as i wanted to go to bed.
When i cleaned up this morning and after the boiler had cooled i chucked the alcometer in and it did read approx 7% but it smelt rank and was maybe about 18-19 litres of backset left.
Have i got a calculation wrong, did i cut my run to quickly or have missed something entirely? I expected to get alot more honestly, considering on a normal ffv i would collect 2.3ish litres all up but with 1 litre considered hearts..... as i type this it doesnt seem that bad actually and i have collected 3 litres of the cleanest 92% ive ever made in a bathroom.
So peoples opinions and criticisms please, does this seem correct, should i try something else, is my thermocouple up the shit?, i missed a step? Have you had something similar happen, what would you expect from 3 stripped ffvs and a slow spirit run through a reflux?