Question for Vendome Condenser Owners:

[Old Glory Distilling Co.]

We're working on putting a closed chilled water loop in place, but since it's taking us longer to get going on than we'd planned, we're going to go ahead and get started by hooking up our city water supply to the still condenser and dephlegmator just so we can start production.

For those of you that are running your Vendome condenser off of city water, what size pipe do you have running to your condenser input? We have a 500 gallon pot still system, and the condenser input opening is 1-1/2". On top of that, Vendome only specs a working pressure of 15psi.

I don't feel that running 1-1/2" copper pipe to the condenser is necessary (not to mention it's $$$), and if I can choke it down to maybe say 3/4", I think I'll get closer to their recommended operating PSI.

Thanks for any thoughts and recommendations.

-Matt

[JustAndy]

1.5" seems like overkill, on a 700 gal still doing a strip run in 7 hours we used municipal water off a 1/2" garden hose and the water flow on that was throttled way down.

[Old Glory Distilling Co.]

Thanks, Andy. About how hot is your water coming off the condenser?

[captnKB]

I used to run a 500 gal vendome. reduce your water line in down to 3/4" put a adjustable flow meter on it. your condenser will always run at very low PSI as it is technically an open system. Even when our still was really pumping out juice on a spirit run it only took about 5GPM to have the hot water coming out at 120 degrees

[Old Glory Distilling Co.]

Great info. Thanks, Kris.