I’m searching for a chiller that can get my solvent tank to sub zero temperatures… I’ve been trying to circulate chilled ethanol thru my jackets but I still can’t seem to keep the tank as cold as I would like once I start recovery… it also makes distilling take for ever… it took me 18 hrs to distill solvent and do a 10lb run… I would really like to speed this process up and make my system run more efficiently… any help would be greatly appreciated.
Had to do a little reading between the lines (your handle helped) to figure out that you’re looking to keep your 100lb jacketed hydrocarbon tank cold (rather than chilling ethanol to extract with it).
how are you currently chilling the ethanol that you are circulating?
how are you currently heating?
in order to maintain sub-zero temps, you’re going to need to pull out as much heat as you’re putting in…so you will need at least as many watts of cooling (at your target temperature) as you have watts of heating.
you haven’t mentioned a pump. I’m assuming that means you don’t have one. nothing wrong with that, but knowing one way or the other does make a difference.
how much solvent did you distil in that 18hr period? How much of it did you run over your 10lbs of biomass? All of it? We use about 5:1 solvent to biomass at -40C to -70C (yep, our chillers are too small as well).
2 Likes
Got any isulation on those tanks? Whats the air temp like inside? Air cooled chillers loose a ton of efficency in hot still air.
1 Like
Get a cheap hydroponics chiller and a heat exchanger to pre chill your gas that you are trying to convert to to liquid then follow that with a super chilled heat exchanger at subzero temps from your current chiller
3 Likes
Absolutely! getting what you can off with water is almost always a win.
the reason this works so well is that Ethanol is a lousy heat transfer fluid compared to water.
I’m using a 1ton air cooled water chiller for this. pretty sure it could handle more than I’m currently throwing at it, but I need to move it to a more appropriate location before I can access that additional cooling. ideally dumping the heat through a wall to the outside.
@cyclopath
I’m currently chilling the ethanol in a tote inside a bigger tote with dry ice surrounding the ethanol tote and I am using a pump I picked up at Lowe’s to help circulate thru the jackets… I’m using roughly 15 gals of ethanol total and it seems about 5 gals fills the jackets… I too like running 5:1 solvent to material… it didn’t take me 18 hrs to distil. That was the time it took me to distill and do the run… didn’t actually time the distillation This time but I was just topping off the tank with 25 lbs and it took way longer than it should have I can tell you that… what chillers are you currently using and do you have any better chillers in mind? Thanks for your time
not sure where we got them, but I’m pretty sure we’re using DL-80/05’s & a have tried a DL-120/05.
the one I’ve added the water assist to gets up to -30C part way through recovery on a 100lbs of solvent, but is back at -50C by pour-out, and at -70C before I’ve got new biomass installed & vac’ed down (3:30 if I’m on top of it).
the other two struggle.
3 Likes