You running co2 to chill the coil jacket?
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No they were hooked to a chiller that took a shit, so back to dry ice and the reason for the chiller talk. @The_Lone_Stiller im just running straight wort coils now, the chiller broke and have been contemplating on which way to go.
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Right on man, I agree with your statement.
This is just an opinion but it seemed to me that Bizzy was more interested in rubbing elbows with the Huber CEO and possibly getting commissions from chiller sales than finding the right tool for the job. I think it’s borderline predatory but that’s just me. I try to let people know as much as possible. If people knew about refrigeration or bothered to look into chillers before shelling out the $$ it’s pretty easy to tell the Unistats are all wrong for us in BHO.
I think -40C is cold enough for live resin injection. There’s no further benefit to going any colder IME.
For recovery it depends on the setup and what kind of delta T you need to maintain across the heat exchanger.
The demand on the recovery exchanger is highly variable depending on the conditions in the tanks/collection pots and the overall operating state of the system plus the ambient conditions.
Chillers are mostly slow to react so you need to size and run them for the most difficult conditions they will face even if that’s only for a brief period.
With dry ice and a submerged coil you can easily add more or less cooling power on demand. You can also maintain decent vapor pressure in your solvent tank and not mess with any N2 if you are running active recovery.
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@Concentrated_humbold IMO any fully enclosed chiller with both the evaporator and condenser inside it, whether it’s air or water cooled, is a terrible choice for this application (medium to large scale butane/propane recovery) and that advice is the same whether it’s an active or a passive setup.
The heat you are removing from the recovery process has to go somewhere. It can’t be created or destroyed. It must all be transferred or transformed.
It just doesn’t make sense to have a fan or air cooled chiller in the work area for a large application like this because that just transfers the heat from the process (and the chiller itself) out into the lab space. If you have a huge open work area this might be ok but generally you would just end up having to increase the rooms HVAC (basically another chiller) to finally expel the heat outside.
See how it’s silly to do that? You have one enclosed chiller system (evap and condenser) that transfers the heat from the process to the air and another split chiller system, the HVAC, to transfer it outside.
You might as well just use a split system in the first place and that’s the final answer if you want to go this route.
Water chilling the enclosed “lab” chiller instead of air cooling is a step in the right direction and that’s why it’s usually mandatory on big boy setups. That’s why Bizzy had a 915w with it’s own 10 ton glycol chiller.
Doesn’t it just hit your gut instinct the wrong way to need a chiller for your chiller? Don’t you feel like there’s too many steps in that process?
The last step to simplification when using a vapor-compression refrigeration system to cool the recovery process is to remove the chiller’s thermal transfer fluid (and pump) from the equation and just chill the process directly with the refrigerant then send the refrigerant to a fan cooled condenser that’s outside the shop. I believe this is what Icetech has. I don’t like that company but they seem to be the only ones who understands this idea and market it to cannabis.
Anyways as you are currently finding out having chiller problems is very shitty and inevitable. Dry ice is very reliable and has a very potent cooling capacity (latent heat of sublimation) that is hard to replicate with a chiller. Also if you run active recovery being able to quickly vary the delta T across the heat exchanger by adding more/less DI to a submerged coil has some big advantages IMO like maintaining proper tank pressure and not needing to vapor assist the tank ever. Can’t do that with a slow chiller. Or a passive setup.
I think you should take the chiller money and get a covered trailer and get yourself a few thousand pounds of ice at a time if you can. Stick with simple wort coils and make the DI trip every 10-14 days instead of every single day.
I don’t stress about the constant “consumable” aspect of DI. I look at it like a baker looks at sugar. It’s just factored into the price of goods produced. Same way the maintenance/electrical cost of a chiller would be.
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This is where I found my fix
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Don’t know what temps you need to hit, but for a hellacious amount of cooling power at -50C I’d be looking at Fluid Chillers AIR ULT series, thats what we use to cool down our bulk ethanol.
In case anyone reading this hasn’t already seen it I’m the guy behind the Who sells huge cryo chillers that aren't huge disappointments? thread…I’m intimately familiar with what the Unistat line costs and how well they perform.
If you aren’t dissuaded by that thread or what @Tech1145 wrote and still want a Unistat, I have one Unistat 815 left that has a new ControlOne a couple months ago. Asking $29k OBO, currently located in northern Colorado but can crate/palletize and ship LTL for reasonable.
I dont need to hit crazy low temps im just lazy (ish) and don’t wanna have to get dry ice all the time but i agree 100% its just one of the costs of doing business.
Honestly like mentioned above I would go with a split refrigerant (“ice tech”) setup it’s relatively cheap around 10k or so installed. I ran a 5hp and never used dry ice once. Did it get crazy cold no but it kept up the entire run, close to 2# a minute on a MVP150 at times.
It did struggle a bit when it was 100 degrees outside, though I don’t you’ll have that problem up north.
Oh not to mention…only drew 22 amps of current @ 240v!
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Makes me think of the “portable a/c”, how many home growers use them vs an actual split a/c.
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Guess u never heard of a package unit. 
.
Hahaha yeah we stupidly had one in the room and thought a second one would do the job, nope, kepts the same temperature and just doubled our electricity cost. Upgrading to a split system now 
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My dude, you may soon be surprised at how important precision temperature/energy control is for folks in this industry-
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I still can’t believe nobody has started a traveling cryo chiller fabrication company with how much these freaking chillers cost. Honestly once you get into the 20ton+ range it really just makes more sense to build the system onsite. Bring in a cooling tower, centrifugal chiller for the top stage retrofit with a big active fade-out tank and a lower temp refrigerant. Then build the low stage to run CO2 and pipe it all to process with jacketed rigid pipe and DX to the process fluid. It might cost as much as a 950 but you’d be looking at 10x as much cooling capacity. With how many people are running these multiple 915s I’m surprised an enterprising HVAC/R company hasn’t cropped up as the industry go-to.
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I mean…
That was the plan…
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Do it! Let me know if you need ideas lol, I have too many
I mean fuck, maybe just skip the whole cascade part and run liquid injection and vacuum in the evaporator on this bad mamma jamma:
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Keeping things cold is important to this industry, Hubers aren’t always great at that, and if they were as devoted to “precision” temperature control as they like to advertise, their datalogging capability wouldn’t be broken, they wouldn’t be using a proprietary thermocouple hookup that none of their dealers stock and their machines would be more reliable than they are.
I’m curious how many people in this industry actually need their Unistats to offer heating ability, as far as I’m concerned it should be an option not an expensive and usually unnecessary default.
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I bet the cheapest option would be to adapt a walk in freezer refrigeration system for the job but that would take extra time and you might need to hire a refrigeration tech to get it setup properly. I think I remember Graywolf talking about this back on ICMag.
IMO the best option right now to get it taken care of in a timely manner is to just buy an Iced Tech. I’m not sure what happened with the whole Iced tech/Bhogart situation it seemed like they were two separate companies under the same roof but then they got into a fight or something a couple years ago, I don’t know.
@greggoose710 is your condenser assembly on you Iced Tech mounted outside or inside?? I thought the original Iced Tech models were setup with outdoor condensers that but it might have changed. Also do you think the system would be better with a larger compressor? 5hp seems a touch small IMO, especially if it was struggling in the Summer time. I would want 10-15HP.
You can see in the pic below from Bhogart’s website that the compressor skid doesn’t exactly look weatherproof but I could be wrong.
If I were going this route I would probably try to talk to Bhogart’s refrigeration guy and see if he can build you a custom unit to fit your needs. I would think you could get a split system with plenty of capacity (10-15HP compressor) for under $30k.
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Ya me and him have talked about it, im gonna continue doing things the way i am for now. Already have so much in infrastructure for a building i have no intention of keeping. I do like those our local Bhogart shore leaves a few rhings to be desired so id have to go south to the san jose store.
Yea that’s really the thing holding me back from doing something like this as well: I don’t own my building.
I don’t have any helpers or assistants but if I did, delegating the dry ice trips to them would be one of the first things I did.
Of course I’m assuming you’ve already considered getting your dry ice delivered by the airgas company and like myself it just isn’t possible because it would arouse suspicion or other reasons.
If I could get dry ice delivered to me I wouldn’t even consider a refrigeration system until I’m going through over 7-800lbs per work day. I’ve gotten my price for it down to about .50 cents/lb which makes it pretty painless to pay for compared to how much oil it can produce.
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Ya i just dont want the building, if it works for another 1.5 yrs or so ill walk away from everything inside. I could have it delivered if I wasn’t hiding in plain sight, for now its the best option. Even with big chiller of any source i like that i know what im getting with dry ice, and minions for dry ice runs is the best especially around lunch time.
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