Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Hey men. Excuse the hiatus. I signed on above five years back and didn't keep posting. I've distilled on and off in that time and turned out some half decent whiskeys.

The reason for my post today is I've relocated to a small townhouse and I'm not sure yet how to cool my condenser. My old house has a 2500L water tank which I recirculated through a pump. With not much yard at the new place I'm unsure how to heat exchange the condenser if I set up the still.

Is there a formula for thermal mass to calculate minimum water volume to condense the vapours? Has anyone else encountered this before?

Hope to post more in future if I can get back into the hobby.

Cheers
Garf

Hi Garfield and welcome back mate :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Now a bit more info is needed like the size and type of condensor, type of still ( as listed a reflux won't do whisky) and finally the size of the boiler and method used for heating ie: flame or element.

When I first started out i just used a 200 litre olive drum for my 2" potstill and 5 litre boiler and found I could do 2 runs back to back before the water got too warm.

Now if you are using a 50 litre keg as a boiler then a 1,000 litre IBC would be the minimum size tank.

so back to you mate for more info

Cheers Bryan

Hi Garfield,
I'm not sure about formulas but from experience stripping 25 litres of wash heated 60 litres of cooling water from about 20 degrees to over 50 and the condenser was struggling. Some people have tried a car radiator and fan to cool the water but would still need a large enough tank. A bit hard to help any more without knowing more about what your using.

Garfield wrote:Hey men. Excuse the hiatus. I signed on above five years back and didn't keep posting. I've distilled on and off in that time and turned out some half decent whiskeys.

The reason for my post today is I've relocated to a small townhouse and I'm not sure yet how to cool my condenser. My old house has a 2500L water tank which I recirculated through a pump. With not much yard at the new place I'm unsure how to heat exchange the condenser if I set up the still.

Is there a formula for thermal mass to calculate minimum water volume to condense the vapours? Has anyone else encountered this before?

Hope to post more in future if I can get back into the hobby.

Cheers
Garf

https://www.advantageengineering.com/fy ... FYI288.php
basically it depends on volume times cooling applied times efficiency , meaning you need a big cooler for the water being pumped and thats usually three times what you thought
:shhh:

Thanks guys handy replies. Good calculator too. I'm leaning towards finding space for a 1000L IBC. My initial idea was two 44gal drums one outbound and one inbound. I'm currently looking at a new still so can't yet commit to that answer. Probably just a 2kw boiler with a little pot condenser. Looked at cheap ones on kegland site

Single 44 will give you two-3strips or a 25l spirit run on lw. Depending On climate. I am in warm area and that is roughly what I would get .

bluc wrote:Single 44 will give you two-3strips or a 25l spirit run on lw. Depending On climate. I am in warm area and that is roughly what I would get .

sounds right
100l strip lifts 200l water about 20c from ambient qld

I got an old aircon that has 2 fans in it. I run the water through the coils with a 20L cube container housed inside the aircon aswell totalling about 40L. that could keep water just above ambient using a t500 with alembic pot running flat out doing a stripping run. I hooked up 2 more 200L blue drums and it handles my 4" bubbler no worries. can also run 2 stills at once with it basically holding ambient temps.

So I landed a 200l olive drum off the side of the road. I'll try this out soon.

This doesn't need a new thread but does anyone have an opinion on fermenting wash on the grist as opposed to running off liquor and fermenting that alone. Any advantage to either method?

Garfield when I do my AG I use my mashtun to do the conversion then EVERYTHING goes into my 60 litre fermenter which is sealed up with water in the airlock to cool down and when it's about 30C I start with making the yeast bomb.

After the first ferment is finished and cleared I made a 30 micron filter to go on the end of my 1/2" siphon line so none of grain can go thru the line , I do find by placing the filer about 1-1/2" above the base of the fermenter does allow a full charge of my 50 litre keg boiler and when I get to 40 litre mark to keep the siphon going the output goes into a cube as the final 5 litres of my boiler to get a full boiler charge is the same height as the fermenter :angry-banghead:

Then i add 10 litres of water to the fermenter or a tad more to ensure all the grains are under water to prevent them drying out and when I fill the fermenter for the generation the spent grain floats so that is removed and new grain replaced.

so how did your heat exchange project work out mate as I do have a few idea's that are totally out the square that could work to cool the water and on a hot day cool the area too. For background info just think Koolgardie Fridge :handgestures-thumbupleft: The output water is sprayed over some hessian sacks with a decent fan blowing thru the sacks OK it may be a slow process but with 2 olive drums tby the time the second is too warm the water from the first one will be cool enough to use.

Cheers Bryan