Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Thought i post a pick and details of the pot still that was born in my shed a few weeks ago.

Its 2" with shotgun condenser The whole thing is about 60cm tall. The shotgun 30cm long, 2" shell with four 1/2" tubes. This ends in a 2" to 1" reducer then futher reduces down to 1/2".



Havent' polished it up yet, that will come later.

so far i've run two TPW strips through it. Its sitting on my keg with 3'ring gas burner. At full blast i'm getting 6l/hour out of it.

I need some advice on it, it seems to huff and puff a lot, a lot of air coming out of it, doesn't seem to be any vapour, just lots of air. Here's a video of it in action, is this normal.



JS

From my understanding vapour collapsing to fast is one of the causes of huffing. A few things that may help are.....get rid of the 1/2 inch product pipe and try 3/4. It seems to me that you then lessen the surging effect of the output. Also try adjusting your water flow on the condeser back till the top of the condenser is warmer than the bottom.If you can get it fairly warm at the top and still have it cool at the bottom you should lessen the huffing. When Ive had that problem Ive noticed that it is usually much worse once the ABV of the wash gets low.

+1 with SBB
also put ya new 3/4" pipe flatter ie: raise ya collection jar/parrot

Thanks for the suggestions, i'll take the 3/4 to 1/2 reducer off and replace it with a 3/4" 45degree elbow and a bit of 3/4" tube on the end of that as my collection point. Will see how it goes next stripping run and try adjusting the condenser water flow.

JS

plus a few little bits of ss / copper srubber in the output end seems to help too.

Spot on BGT :handgestures-thumbupleft:

A little update. I had some feints in a bottle so decided to run them through huff puff and try a few things.

First i run it as it was before, but turned the water flow down so the top of the shotgun was hot and the bottom was cool. Unfortunately, when i turned it down enough to stop the huffing (vapour collapsing), heaps of vapours came out the end. And when i turned the flow up enough to stop the vapours coming out, it huffed and puffed again. So you're all spot on, its the vapour collapsing that is causing my huff puff.

So i tuned it off, put what i'd collected back in the boiler and decided I might add something to increase turbulence in the shotgun. I got some copper wire (about 1.5mm thick), wound it around a thin metal rod to make a spiral shape then stretched it out so it would fit easily inside the 1/2" inch shotgun tubes. I put one of these in each tube (they go the whole length of the tube), then turned it back on again.

This time i was able to get the water flow just right so there was no huff puff and no vapour coming out. So now i know a bit of turbulence in the vapour path through the condenser really does make a difference. As the ABV went down it started huffing again, so i had to occasionally turn the water flow down too, and no more huffing a puffing and no vapour coming out. :-D

Thanks for the suggestions, this seems to have fixed it.

JS

Good to see you got it working JS :handgestures-thumbupleft: :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Send me your addy in a pm and i will send you some copper mesh to push up there.

pm sent, Thanks 5Star.

Tried out a strip using the copper mesh up the shotgun, that works heaps better, don't have to worry about the water flow, product comes out nice and smooth for the whole run.
Thanks 5Star. :text-thankyoublue:

You are very welcome.

Nice to be able to give back to the community that's given me so much satisfaction so freely. :dance: