Pre-heating still question

[Mackenzie]

Hey guys, wanted to run a question by everyone.

Our =heat-up time on our stripping still is quite long (2.5 hours for a 2000L wash) making for a 10-12 hour stripping run.

We have considered pre-heating the wash in the still the day before collection. That would mean heating the wash to 60-80ºC and leaving it there for 18ish hours before starting the distillation. Are there any repercussions for doing this? Any experience with this?

Thanks for your help!

[Kindred Spirits]

Sounds like you need to make an adjustment to the heating system. Is it electrical or steam?

[Classick]

We have a pre-heater on our still system, I can put the material for the next run in the top vessel and pass the distillate vapor through coils in that tank to heat exchange the liquid.

Our runs only last about 2.5- 3 hours, but in that time the liquid gets up to anywhere from 130-180 (54c to 82c) degrees, saving me about 45 min on the next run (from a cold startup).

I haven't noticed any adverse effects to this process in our 20+ years of operations, but it's also not cooking the material for hours, its usually only hot for the last hour of our run. If you built something similar, you might consider a valve setup letting you engage the pre-heater only in the last couple hours of your run. 

As long as there's a lid on the vessel, evaporation loss should be minimal, depending on how long its sitting there at temp. (there should be a breather valve though). Also the ABV of the material you're distilling matters as far as evaporation loss. For example, we don't put anything stronger than 13-15% in the pre-heater.

what are you distilling?