Successful experiments

[Admiral Toad]

Well just finished the 27 litre 30% run and it was best yet
IMHO tapping the top of the column really helps the T500 I got 7.5l litres of 93-94% good hearts plus heads and tails in under 5 hours Inc heating up much quicker than before.
I also added the baking soda and wether this helped the speed I dont know but it did seem cleaner tasting/smelling than previous.
As well as this I was playing with my 20 quid infra red thermometer and I think this works really well at gauging the progress of the run when you don't have a wash thermometer. I found you need to put a couple of bits of black tape to give a target for accurate measuring (the beam must bounce off the brushed stainless steel finish otherwise) and you can very accurately see where you are up to ie 80 to 90 degrees C in the hearts rapid rise to 100 as tails approach etc.
I will take a few more notes and timings next time but I think it's a useful tool
All in all quite chuffed !

[Normski]

Hi AT
Sounds like your having sucess there mate.
What thermemeter are you useing, Is it one of the stick it in your ear jobs or something a bit special, as it sounds interesting.
Norm

[Admiral Toad]

It's a digital infra red with a laser you just point the spot where you want the measurement pull the trigger and bingo ! 20 quid on amazon well worth it

[Capt-Cudellez]

Hi AT, glad it worked out for you - with a large amount of alcohol in the boiler there is much easier to get clean hearts with less smearing.

Just curious on your numbers - did you mean you collected 7.5l total (heads+hearts+tails) or 7.5L hearts. I reckon there was only 8.1L of available alcohol, the t500 can recover about 95% of that, 7.5L is 92% so if that's all hearts then something doesn't add up, I can ever get less than 10% heads without running on really low power over several hours - I don't do that as it not worth the time spent.
Glad you had a good run - just want to find out how the numbers break down.

[Admiral Toad]

CC you're quite correct on overall alcohol content, in truth it was a touch more than 30%
bear in mind on the first runs rather than full strips I had got rid of much of the heads and tails
On this run I collected 200ml of heads and 500ml of tails maybe greedy but the ABV in the parrot never got below 93% in what I classed as hearts

[Capt-Cudellez]

Ah right, that makes sense. I have found it much less efficient to cut heads on a full out strip, my experience with that is you end up cutting about the same volume of alcohol on each wash than you would from having 3 or 4 times as much alcohol in the boiler for the spirit run.
The amount of heads is tiny it just tricky trying to compress that into a small amount of take off, this is best done at a slow rate - where on a strip I run quickly for the best use of time.

[Admiral Toad]

Yes that will be my plan when I get the pothead but when I am still using the reflex for both runs it seamed sense to cut in both runs
Certainly pleased with the results though

[Admiral Toad]

Got up a bit sharper and decided to run a classic wash which was ready and was pushing 19% so with a bit of previous added it was looking at 5 plus litres
Made a note of timings and temps so here goes
It took the usual hour twenty to heat up and start so from there

Start. 90.0 C
End of heads 90.8 C. 300ml into heads bottle
One hour. 92.7 C. 1550ml in collector
Two hour. 94.4 C. 3200ml
Three hour. 97.6 C. 4400ml
Three hour 20mins. 98.7 C. 4800ml finish of hearts collection
Three hour 45mins. 99.7 C. 350ml of tails collected still dripping but stopped here

So all told just over 5 hours and 5450 ml produced

All approx and to the best of my judgement. No doubt some would cut earlier or later but hope this makes some sense !

AT