by RC Al » Thu May 23, 2019 5:57 pm
Sooo a while since i updated this
A few weeks back i tried to do a 30l 1.5 spirit run of NGW for a maiden voyage, found it wasnt the best thing to try straight up, by the time i had it running ok i worked out i was doing 5l/hour :angry-tappingfoot: I had massive huffing issues that i blamed on air bubbles in my extended cooling hose run and a lack of a valve other than a shifting spanner...
A couple of weeks later (life n stuff) i had another go with a valve (ok its a 19mm bung tap, but hey it works after a fashion) from my little still attached and attention paid to bleeding the water system. Also added a makeshift shroud that was sitting around looking ugly, just for the challenge of changing more than one thing at once... This was only a 20l @40% run, got the gas dialled down nicely and seemed to be on top of things, with the odd huff, heads taken off at 1.5l/h, minor pick up in speed for hearts - aprox 2l/h, once well into hearts the hufffing that was being intermittent previously came back hard and i had to dial down to about 1l/h to finish the hearts and abandon the some of the tails, hadn't had any home made for a month, i was thirsty damnit....
So thinking the slow running was the issue i tried to confirm the idea, i ran 17l of uj through for a stripping run, Just to continue with the two changes madness, I also added a scrubbie in the bend, figuring that any reflux would go back down to the boiler.. nope, didnt work, more huffing, cracked it turned the burner off and quickly moved the scrubbie to the reducer to the liebig (hot potato, hot potato) got it back up running at a much quicker (unmeasured) rate and only got one huff out of it right at the end when i was down to 30% and pushing it through
So after chatting with a few friendly experienced people :character-oldtimer: Iv'e got the following to try on my list
An actually full charge of 40 litres - on top of this, about to put down 100l of uj
A real valve - - needle preferably
Pretty sure my cooling water was into the single digits - windchill on a hose on dewy grass, might see if i can do a run during the day, a smaller difference in vapour to coolant temp may help, will have to get on to some temp probes (yeah yeah pointless i know, but i like numbers)
I am confident that the burner can run slow enough now - 5 hours of spirit run was 2.5 kgs of gas, It wasnt running as slow as it could, havent done the hole/drill thing yet, a better shroud will happen soon too
I am thinking that my aircon reducer may be half the problem, im considering adding a extra valve to the liebig outlet and wrapping some 6mm around the reducer as an adjustable pre-cooler so that vapour hits a more gradual temp gradient as it goes along
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