by 1 2many » Mon Feb 24, 2014 5:12 pm
Food for thought not my words but I thought it would be good here..
Well just consider what parts of your still may cause a fire. There is your heat source and the ethanol itself. So you could have a electric fire (because you you run electric elements), a liquid ethanol fire, or gasious ethanol fire. Most standard fire extinguishers are labeled ABC. This means they will put out solids, liquids and electrical fires.
From there there are two types of ABC extinguishers. Dry chemical, and Co2. The cheapest option will be a ABC dry chemical extinguisher. This type of extinguisher works by putting a blanket of non flammable, material over the fuel depriving it of oxygen. This will work well with burning liquid ethanol, or an electrical fire, but if you have a fire coming straight from your still where the ethanol is burning in a gasious form it will not work as well because it cannot blanket a gas with the solid material. The ABC Co2 extinguisher on the other hand will put out the ethanol burning as a gas as well as the other two conditions. It creates a cloud of gasious carbon dioxide that dispaces all the oxygen around the fuel.
Now this part is very important! If you happen to have a fire started by ethnol in gas form, like from a leak in your still, or if your condensor isnt working properly then you really dont even want to be around your still because it is completely filled with a slightly pressurised flammable gas. This is a perfect condition for an explosion. The best thing to do in this situation is turn your heat source off and walk away till it cools down. The scary part about that is that pure ethanol burns clean without color, so you may not even know if you have a leak that has caught fire. This is why paying attention to your still is very important. Buy a mirror and hold it up to where you think you have a leak, and it will fog up wherever ethanol is escaping as a gas. Seal all leaks as soon as possible because you just dont even want to mess with that catching fire.
When looking for an extinguisher just make sure it is the ABC type, which shouldent be hard to find. Then think about the capabilities of the two types of ABC extinguishers and which you would rather have. One other thing to keep in mind is that dry chemical extinguishers will make a giant mess, putting very fine white powder everywhere, where as the Co2 will just dissipate and leave nothing behind.