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Larry

wrote in news:6chsc3td9ckr21rahjbj2atgd18gsbrpas@
4ax.com:

Just out of curiosity, how is the steam condensed? I watched the
animated show and that subject didn;t seem to be mentioned.

My mate uses a 3 inch stainless reflux still but he is running twenty
gallon batches.
Bruce in Bangkok
(brucepaigeATgmailDOTcom)

The steam is routed, with only the pressure from the kettle sealed at the
lip and where it shoves on the pipe, no pressure at all, actually,
through a stainless tubing with a small fan blowing air through the flat
coil of tubing that's loosely wound so the air can get to the coils. Hot
air escapes out louvers in the top. This time of year, I leave it
running on my stovetop under the kitchen exhaust fan so the heat doesn't
have to be pumped out, once again, by the air conditioner. In winter, it
heats half my little 14 x 70 stationary caravan (trailer to the
Americans), recovering 100% of the energy it took to boil it.

The heat exchanger works very well as the water dripping out of it is
barely warm at the other end of the pipe. No steam comes out the open
pipe because of the contraction changing states from steam back into
water. My lab unit's boiler is too hot and some steam came out making
the whole house like a swamp if you left it run for hours and hours.
This tabletop unit from Waterwise doesn't do that. To see how much water
was lost, I did a test by dumping the distilled water gallon it makes
back into the boiler to see how far towards the maximum water mark it
came. It lost only about one mm of level in the whole process, so
virtually no water/steam is lost, very efficient, indeed. Of course, the
heat generated in the boiler eventually ends up coming out the top of the
condenser as dry heat after the condensing operation.

It's quite simple, actually. On a boat system, I'd look for a pipe-in-a-
pipe condensor of stainless, not copper like a marine AC uses for its
freon condenser. You'd get to pump the heat overboard in hot climates
with seawater condensing, that way. In winter, you could shut the
seawater pump down and blow cabin air over the condensor to recover the
heat to the cabin you were pumping overboard all summer. You only have
to drop the temperature below 100C to condense all the steam....much
easier than freon.

Larry
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