Optimizing your RotoVap

Awesome post, thanks

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Use a big cooler. Fill with warm/hot water.
Place mason jars with etoh wash inside. Thos will warm up the etoh wash, and be already warm when you suck it into your rotovap.

I had a spare big igloo cooler eyeballing me, i tried it and it worked pretty good.

Edit:
When i need to refill my 5l flask with room temp etoh wash, it literally takes -1.5 mins to get to flowing normally again. After i break vac to drain the recieving flask, it takes 45 seconds for the vac to go back to normal. BUT after 10x of doin g this, thats a total of 24.5 mins. Do that 2-3x and tour almost 1hr of down time.

I go my the numbers now. Whats the quickest, safest, and thurough way to do things now. Almost 8 yrs of 7day work weeks is tiresome for sure!

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The point of the preheater is just to prevent dumping a bunch of room temp, often much colder post winterization, solution into the BF. Which will stop the distillation until equilibrium is reached again.

No super heating, just making sure incoming solution is relatively close in temp to the boiling flask solution

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Yeah, -20 feed stream would definitely slow you down.

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I’m no bizzybee, won’t catch me bending the laws of thermodynamics :wink:

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Not sure if anyone else has done this, just I just found that the chinese RE series roto recovery ports can be attatched to a 2" triclamp fitting with very, very little effort.

broke my flask just now, and love finding solutions to problems quickly- this seems rather useful- triclamps are my legos now.

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So just hook it up to 2” tri clamp kegs and get much larger reviving flasks?

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you’ll need some hoses and valves, but yes you can directly hook a 2" triclamp fitting to a chinese roto- just shave the gasket on one side.

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Put a T on your feed line and when you want to empty it just turn the valve or use the same feed line and have it hooked to a pump as lonf as your feed hose goes all the way to the bottom

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Get gamma buckets for survival and cut a whole in the top tou can get 30 gallon buckets so you will only have to put the hose in another bucket when it’s full

Well that was a freakin game changer.

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Well done sir

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@Rowan How do you tell the keg (fantastic idea btw!) is full? Is there a cold-trap before the pump?
(We get 20 liters/hour recovery on all three of our 50 liter Rotos. @spdking. Just saying)

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How are you getting such fast recovery?!

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I don’t run a cold trap anymore, just make sure the upper condenser isn’t dripping - the half liter of ethanol I lose every other day or so if I’m being aggressive with evap is not a big deal to me rn.

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I can tell when the keg is full after I put 15 gal through the unit. I can have my fab guy put a sight glass port on the top but as of now have not had any issues paying attention to how much ethanol goes in.

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That does, of course, makes sense. :spoon:

Place a weight scale under the keg and weigh a full keg :grin:

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I DO have a floor scale.

just had it overfill on me for the first time just now actually… super not a big deal, closed the valve (dernord off of amazon are great 2" ball valves, holds the vac well) and put a fresh clean towel under the clamp… towel goes into the centrifuge and I get my booze back. easy.

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Off label use: warm yesterday’s coffee because the microwave is still on order.

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