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Carbon filters? Factory? Homemade?


HottyToddy77

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Are you talking about using a Code 7/AB style cartridge filter housing with granulated carbon?

Not worth the money, and the geometry is all wrong.

But realize you'll need filtration after carbon, since even the highest quality carbon can throw off enough particulate to cause a problem.  Which means go back to the filter housing with the appropriate final filtration.

In terms of a spool-based carbon filter, sure, use a mesh triclamp gasket with a mesh size smaller than your carbon granule size, and make sure you are keeping it vertical and using slow upflow (to minimize particulates).

Washing your carbon with filtered water can help reduce fines as well, but simply handling the carbon is enough to cause more particulates.

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9 hours ago, HottyToddy77 said:

If you are building your own with a stainless spool how are you keeping the carbon contained? Gasket with mesh? Source of carbon?

Im not at the distillery but mine is like this:

filter-0001.thumb.png.982ba462792826c1d36a592089f1ec93.png

I use simple platinum cured silicone for the in and outflow. Pick it up at your LHBS.  It's really not much more than a trickle -- contact time is the name of the game. 300 gallons in about 12 hours.  Be sure to wash your carbon bed w RO water. We use 12x40 coco husk carbon. I'll need to check as our spool may be 36" not 24" -- it was clearly the most expensive component. We also have a small 1/2" 3-part value to module flow into the bottom of the filter. All in it was around $750.

 

 

Edit: Add cost.

 

 

 

 

 

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I noticed on one website their triclamp mesh gaskets were made with viton and they said not to use with spirits. 

in line strainer 150 mesh from glacier might be a better solution.

https://www.glaciertanks.com/tri-clamp-fittings-strainers-str-g200.html

 

 

Indy your drawing was basically what i was thinking.  i was thinking 6" by 48" for the carbon,  biggest 8" glacier sells is 8" x 20"

 

https://store.tcwequipment.com/products/flojet-g70-explosion-proof-air-diaphragm-pump some like this for a pump

 

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This isn't a solution I would have come up with, but I inherited a setup with pentair big blue housings and epm-20BB carbon block filter cartridges, and they actually work pretty well at polishing.  At about 50 bucks each, they aren't too crazily expensive for how much volume of product you can treat with each one:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Pentek-EPM-20BB-20-in-x-4-5-8-in-Carbon-Block-Water-Filter-PENTEK-EPM-20BB/206017179

 

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HottyToddy

 

We have sanitary spools in many different sizes and all of the other parts that you need for making your carbon filters, including the screen gaskets.  We have one of the deepest sanitary parts catalogs in the US.  Our quality is excellent and our prices are much better than glacier tanks.  https://shop.distillery-equipment.com/collections/pipe-tubing-spools/Tri-Clamp-Spools  We have double diaphram ethonal pumps for pulling ethonal through filters.  We also have vacuum pumps and traps if you want to use vacuum to pull the ethonal through the filter.  Pooring it through can take forever.  We do not have the vacuum pumps and traps on our site.  You would need to call 417-778-6100

 

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7 hours ago, HottyToddy77 said:

 

 

 

Indy your drawing was basically what i was thinking.  i was thinking 6" by 48" for the carbon,  biggest 8" glacier sells is 8" x 20"

 

 

 

I didn't see the above when i made my first post.  I have the 6" by 48"sanitary  spools for $250.71 each.  We have spools in stock as large as 12" by 48".  These are  mirror polished inside and out.  https://shop.distillery-equipment.com/collections/pipe-tubing-spools/products/6-x-48-long-sanitary-spool-tri-clamp-tri-clover-stainless-steel-pipe-tubing

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http://s3.amazonaws.com/ips-cic-filestore/r98563/monthly_2017_12/Cabot_Pilot_Column_pdf.3f574085b56c4150a3e309e1b39cd7fa?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAJT2TITQDSPGUQOUQ/20180224/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20180224T114915Z&X-Amz-Expires=1200&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=attachment; filename*=UTF-8''Cabot_Pilot_Column.pdf&response-content-type=application/pdf;charset=UTF-8&X-Amz-Signature=b4d6bca105bb46ba8ced329b9318c9bb2eb06e6c37faf9605b6c6c36955cd82c

 

Main take aways on building a carbon filter construction.

1. Down flow is better to ensure carbon bed stays packed, but need to ensure carbon stays flooded. Note Pumping in from the bottom is not ideal. Solution build a “U”, carbon being in the in-feed on the down leg and clean product comes up the other leg. 

2. Minimum carbon column size is 1.5” x 24” but 4” + diameter is Reccomended so the product doesn’t just flow along the pipe walls and bypass the carbon bed.

3. carbon contact time is important, therefore cartridge style carbon filters are not ideal.

 

 

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I spoke to the techs at Cabot/Norit when we were working on decolorization protocol for rum.

There is no specific preference with regards to up or down flow, and they indicate that it's something that's driven by the final process design.  They don't make a recommendation either way, except they did caution that higher flow rates in an up flow scenario is not ideal as it will cause agitation of the carbon bed and generate particulate.  The other factor was in very large columns, upflow is reserved for column backwash, where particulate can be removed from the carbon bed, as backwashing with down flow would just compact particulate in the bed.

The other part we talked about, that was very interesting, was the multi-column approach.  In their design, the early columns will exhaust before the final columns, it becomes very easy to compare the column effluent from the early stages to the late stages to determine carbon exhaustion.  In one big column, this is going to be a bit more subjective (depending on what you are doing).

What's really interesting, is the flow rate recommendation of .1 to 3 total bed volumes per hour.  So for an 8" by 24" bed volume (assume appropriate freeboard), you are talking about 15 gallons an hour being the recommended top-end flow rate.

 

 

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6 minutes ago, Silk City Distillers said:

What's really interesting, is the flow rate recommendation of .1 to 3 total bed volumes per hour.  So for an 8" by 24" bed volume (assume appropriate freeboard), you are talking about 15 gallons an hour being the recommended top-end flow rate.

Wow! That's surprising. So our 6x30 column should max out at 11 gallons / hour.  Looks like we need to slow our roll.

 

 

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silk city lets see your setup. 4 4" tubes 24" long in a series?

Indy you could add additional carbon tubes to keep the speed up. At what point is a spirit over filtered? For vodka the cleaner the better possibly but if one was making a white whiskey they might not want as much filtration.

recommended tubing to use? 

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22 minutes ago, Silk City Distillers said:

I could not get columns to work effectively for decolorization.  The end result had far too little flavor.

I use powdered carbon and treat an entire tank in one shot by making a slurry, then rapidly filtering the slurry.

interesting some moonshiners in my area hang granulated carbon wrapped in cheese cloth down in a tank for a week or so to get the benefits of carbon.

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5 hours ago, indyspirits said:

You never miss a trick do you. 

 

Where is the trick?  I have what HottyToddy is asking for and could not find anywhere else.  I don't think anyone else has them.  I am very well known for my customer service and the quality of my equipment, as well as the price of my equipment.  I don't understand why you have a problem with me offering equipment on here when someone states that they have a need for that equipment.  I am certainly not the only vender who does that.  I do it more than most because I have a wider variety and a much more comprehensive line of equipment than most.  I am certainly not hindering anyone in anyway, on the contrary I have helped a huge number of people on this forum with their equipment needs and there are no negative reveiws of my company here or anywhere else on the internet.  Considering the volume of business that I do, I think that is pretty incredible.

  I have all of the parts shown in your drawing at a better price than any of the vendors that you have listed and the quality of my parts is just as good if not better than the vendors that you have listed.  Also I typically have better shipping prices.  I am here to help anyone with what they need for filter housings etc. Just send us a drawing and or parts list for a quote or we can supply you with one of our designs. 

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I have a customer in New Jersey that ordered a parts kit from me for a carbon filter set which included a vacuum pump and trap.  He said that he received the design from an expert and that the expert told him that the best results are obtained by having the pump suck the spirit through the carbon instead of pushing it through.  He also said that running under vacuum enhanced the filtering process.   Does anyone know anything about this type of carbon filtering set up?  I am getting ready to research this and do some thorough testing.  Is anyone here interested in seeing the results of the testing? 

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1 hour ago, Southernhighlander said:

I have a customer in New Jersey that ordered a parts kit from me for a carbon filter set which included a vacuum pump and trap.  He said that he received the design from an expert and that the expert told him that the best results are obtained by having the pump suck the spirit through the carbon instead of pushing it through.  He also said that running under vacuum enhanced the filtering process.   Does anyone know anything about this type of carbon filtering set up?  I am getting ready to research this and do some thorough testing.  Is anyone here interested in seeing the results of the testing? 

I would like to see some actual testing for a carbon filter. then you could build us a kit at a good price so we didn't have to hunt down all the pieces.

vacuum would probably work but will the pump be able to draw it through a large filter or would that be too much head for the pump. 

I am leaning toward building a filter with 4 spools that are 4" in diameter and  24" long in a series as illustrated on page 3 of the article silk posted.

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HottyToddy,  We should size your filter appropriately.  How much volume are you talking per hour?  Also, what are you filtering exactly?  I can see the multicolumn set up working well for Vodka or GNS for Gin but that is probably way too much filtration for most other spirits.

 I don't think that a vacuum set up will work well for the multiple column system.  I think that we would be better off going with a double diaphram pump.  We will do a design drawing in Auto Cad using the drawing and recommendations from Cabot.    Once the drawing is complete we will build one and test it.  

Silk, do you think Cabot's multiple column design will work well for HottyToddy's needs if he is looking for an absolute neutral?

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those flow jet pumps are around 5 gpm and I was planning on using one of those. batches would probably range from 50 gallons to 250 gallons. I sent an email to Paul so we could work from there and maybe talk Monday, I called Friday but you were out. After we have something working we could update everyone.

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On 2/24/2018 at 3:55 PM, Southernhighlander said:

Silk, do you think Cabot's multiple column design will work well for HottyToddy's needs if he is looking for an absolute neutral?

I don't know that 4 are necessary, but if you read through their logic, there are benefits to multiple columns vs one single larger column of equal size.  You can sample the output of column 1, compared to column 2, and know whether or not column 1 is exhausted, and if column 2 is picking up the slack.

I would have thought, what's it matter, carbon volume is carbon volume, right?

 

5a9352872b0a8_ScreenShot2018-02-25at7_18_56PM.png.efd800657acab7fa35640c293b870769.png

 

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