Hi Folks,
Read a comment somewhere on the forum about using a coil and waste hot water from a stripping run to preheat a wash prior to distilling. Thought this was a good idea as I needed to strip a couple of FFV’s. Took about a hour to knock up a simple coil from 1/2” copper, a couple of fittings and an off cut of timber.
Pretty simple really. Cost me about $25 for the stuff I didn’t have. I was in a bit off a rush trying to get some neutral organised for Xmas holidays so I cold crashed the two washes. The first wash came out of the fridge yesterday and was put into the boiler at 18 degrees. The boiler took 46 minutes to get to 78 degrees. I was running the pot quite hard and the output water was reasonably warm. Ran it through the coil that was placed into the second wash.
The second wash was only removed from the fridge this morning and was only 6 degrees when the coil was placed in the fermenter. At the end of the first stripping run, the second wash had warmed to 35 degrees. This reduced the heat up time by 11 minutes on the second wash. Looks like this may be a simple way to make some use of waste water. Will be using this technique from now on.
Cheers
Les