StillSmart

Evenin All,

if im understanding things correctly the t500 CM still set up is grand for eliminating the tails as they fail to exit as long as the ideal temp of the water outflow is mantained.

The Boka style Lm stills are great at compressing the heads..

SO... how about sitting a pot head on top of a traditional boka condenser ( ok some mod to exit the condenser in/out water feed through the side)

Allowing you to run the condenser with a hi flow to allow collection to start via the boka , then once the compressed heads have been collected and your collecting the goodstuff, close the boka valve drop the waterflow to effectivly switch 1/2 way thru from LM collection to CM collection??

Or is the outflow of the CM water running down inside the column a crucial aspect of the still design??

Its ok to shoot me down in flames on this one >:D

Cheers

Nothing daft at all. The theory is sound but in practice it is not quiet as straight forward as it appears to be.

I borrowed this picture from a post by Vino Tinto - Thanks VT.



The reflux coil on the T500 is deliberately small to allow some of the vapours to pass. This is for a small heater that the T500 comes with. Even with this small coil the control of the cooling fluid is important and needle valves are needed to adjust the amount of cooling.

On a typical LM set up it is the reverse, the coil is generally twice as big as it needs to be to ensure that no vapours passes the coil when the boiler is set as its maximum, whatever that happens to be.

So the trick is to come up with some form of control on the coolant to the coil that will do both, not an easy task but doable.

LM / VM works well and the same parameters are needed for the Reflux Condenser which is the reason I chose this option.

Ahh so it would require a 2ndary small condenser too.. as ive just chopped my column down to less than 1m to allow me to fit the boka head and condenser in under the sheds new ceiling i dont think i could fit the mod in without loosing more height from my column.

Or if i were to knock off the power and switch over heads i could perhaps manage it,
food for thought hmm

thing is i enjoy fiddling with kit as much as employing it..

Fil wrote:Ahh so it would require a 2ndary small condenser too

That's the way that I am going to do it, but not till next year.

Fil wrote:Ahh so it would require a 2ndary small condenser too.. as ive just chopped my column down to less than 1m to allow me to fit the boka head and condenser in under the sheds new ceiling i dont think i could fit the mod in without loosing more height from my column.

Or if i were to knock off the power and switch over heads i could perhaps manage it,
food for thought hmm

thing is i enjoy fiddling with kit as much as employing it..

Errrrr. Is this the shed you mentioned elsewhere!!

packapoo wrote:

Errrrr. Is this the shed you mentioned elsewhere!!

thats the one.. almost lost it but as i didnt i treated it to a refit with insulation and nice washable walls n ceiling..

I've thought about this mod too, I was thinking of a few ways to do it but I don't know which one would work best from a control point of view.

Option 1
A two or three 6mm coils just below the top of the packing material.

Option 2
To have two or three small tubes pass straight through the column all at the top of the packing at 90 or 60 degrees to each other respectively.

Option 3
Make one like the T500 with a long tube going down the column and a few coils at the top.

Any ideas what might work best?