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All very good points Paul. He's the one who said wind, solar, not me. Since he brought it up, I had to assume that he had access or was considering building something.

i have a small farm and am exploring the idea of having a "farm to bottle" type distillery. I am in SE WA state. I am zoned for ag-res 10, which allows a distillery in that zoning and it also allows a residence. In this situation what would be the minimum distance from a residence to the permitted area for the distillery? thank you in advance

Pump water from the pond and use tube-in-tube heat exchangers from @Southernhighlander, cheap and portable. You can heat and cool what you need cheaply without the need for a bunch of engineering costs. If your distillery takes off you'll outgrow what you design today - that can get expensive, we're experiencing it everyday.

Thanks for the above advice. I have purchased a personal monitor RK GP-03 for AU$400. It has been set for initial alarm at 5% LEL then a second level 10% LEL. I sat it in the lowest point of my bond store this morning and it read ZERO. There is a small amount of natural ventilation in there. For the rest of the day it sat on the floor next to the still while it was doing a stripping run. It read zero all day except when we poured a small amount of the output onto the floor to mimic a spill and it indicated 1% of LEL for a minute or so. Very encouraging results. My stil

Hey there! I missed this topic when you posted it. I recently started putting a sheet for production together a couple of days ago. I'll refine it over time to automate more outputs. FYI I'm a very small distillery, and I'm tailoring it to myself so I don't know if it will be useful for you. This is a first draft with just a couple hours of work by an amateur excel user, so don't expect too much. Eventually I'll create forms to really have a viable user interface, but for now it's just a basic spreadsheet with a few simple formulas. Still I'm happy with it thus fa

Like he said its likely not really possible unless you completely change the dynamics of continuous distillation. Im not saying there isn't one like it it in the world, but I have never seen a continuous column that didnt feed onto the plates, so feeding onto the plates and then having it hit packing is just gonna clog the packing up either way.

There is no sensor for the notch and the width of the path is approximately 4.5".

There are already a number of low cost and even “free” open source solutions for controlling mashing and fermenting processes - so 2/3 of the “problem” have already been solved. Many of these platforms can be easily used to allow for monitoring of the still as well. Plenty of folks here already using them. You’ll find that many here, and in the industry in general, are strongly against remote still control, because it enables reckless behaviors, that when go bad, impact all of us from a liability, regulatory, and scrutiny perspective.

Hi Ryan! Welcome to the forum Will you buy ready-made equipment for the production of alcohol and vodka, or will you design the equipment yourself?

It is pointless 🙂 Packings (filling, backfilling) inside the column play the role of increasing the area and smoother distribution of the temperature difference over the height of the column. Main problems: 1) The fill column cannot act as a stripping column because solids will clog all the passages. 2) with a large diameter of the column, there is a big problem of uniform distribution of reflux over the diameter of the column and the vapor velocity upward along the diameter of the column. 3) in the column "with filling" (nozzles are filled up) it is impossible to

I wrote an article on cleaning hoses that may be of some use, and here's a link that outlines different cleaning formulas and typical max temps/concentrations for different hose liner materials. Any time you have an oily product and a non-oily product it's best to keep the hoses separate. Clean the hose, scrub it, and keep it in good shape, but the oil will stick and—depending on what type of oil it is—will typically shorten the hose's lifespan. Some fats and oils are quite aggressive on hose elastomers. Folks that work with both oils and spirits—say, a facility that produces both wine an

Don't waste your time. Go directly to Universal Packaging and let them do the heavy lifting.

http://www.katmarsoftware.com/alcodens.htm worth every penny. It will print your proofing calculations if dont want to create a form.

91-Salt-Distillation.pdf

Hi Adam the surging you are experiencing I think may be caused by the condenser. the style of condenser you have needs a fairly high flow rate to cool properly, so you are most likely having very cold water hitting very hot vapor, this will create a vacuum/pressure cycle that while similar to "chuffing" has a much longer cycle time as for solutions,turn down your water flow to the condenser till it stops, your distillate will probably come out hot if left like this, but turn the cooling water up slowly till you find a point of equilibrium between surging and warm distillate. On a lar