My StillDragon Activated Carbon Filter

punkin

Glad it all worked out for you mate.

AZZA1984

@Heef71 said: Parts have arrived!! I couldn't wait to put it together, as soon as I got home I unpacked the box and started assembling the parts for a trial fit to get my measurements and bracket positioning. The bottom 180 bend is at the welders getting a 3/4" ferrule welded onto the bottom for a drain, so in the mean time I've used 2 90's. I'll get it back next week (going on a work trip tomorrow for the rest of the week). The activated carbon is on it way from Clarence Water Filters and I'll need to mod some brackets to mount it on the side of my work bench.

But here she is, it trial fit form. I may need to change a few things on final fitment but you get the idea.

I'll post again once its fitted.

I was thinking the same thing how much better is this design going

Heef71

It works for me!!! I have it fixed to the side of my work bench so its compacted, easy to reach and refill. The 6" section holds about 4 liters. I fill it up at night, run at 3 drips per second (or 500mls per hour) and when i get up in the morning I have 4L's of clean spirit in the demi. Too easy.

I have made a few changes to the original design as the pic is just a trial fit. I have a 180 bend on the bottom with a 3/4" ferule and ball valve for easy draining (when or if required). The 180 bend on the top has a 2" ferule welded to the top with a 2" cap and triclamp to serve as an inspection port (could use 2" glass instead of s/s cap). I have fitted 2" mesh discs at each join to hold the active carbon in place, mainly to aid dis-assembly down the track so carbon doesn't spill everywhere. I have caps on the top inlet and on the 3/4" outlet to keep it all sealed up when not in use.

The carbon must remain covered in product to prevent air pockets in the carbon that will reduce the effectiveness of the filtering, sooo there will always be around 2L of product inside, which is no big deal considering how cheap it is to make.

It works great!!

richard

In water filtration we look for "ideally" at least 3 seconds product to carbon contact time. Higher than this is then a bonus.

CothermanDistilling

3 seconds? with water, we look for 10 minutes of empty bed contact time, and we are talking VOC's that make things smell bad in spirits...

EBCT FOR SOME COMMON CONTAMINENTS

CHLORINE = 2 MINUTES

VOC'S = 7 MINUTES

HYDROGEN SULFIDE H2S = 4 MINUTES

AceNZ

@salientlucidity said: If anyone is wanting charcoal in NZ, Commodities NZ Limited supplies 3 grades in sizes from 1kg ($15.00) up. Its cheaper than the the local HBS.

That link has changed: ACTIVATED CARBON - WHY AND HOW @ Commodities NZ Limited

However, they only seem to carry two large-grain sizes, 8/16 and 4/8 mesh, and an 80/200 mesh powder.

According to Gert's book, grain size should be in 0.4 to 0.85 mm range, which is 20 x 40 mesh.

Does anyone know of other good suppliers in NZ? I found activatedcarbon.co.nz, but they seem to only provide super-bulk quantities (400 to 500 kg minimum).

Kapea

Dechlorination of water by activated carbon is by catalytic reduction. Removal time is a function of carbon particle size, chlorine disinfectant species and concentration (and temperature and pH). Times can vary greatly.

Smaug

@Kapea said: Dechlorination of water by activated carbon is by catalytic reduction. Removal time is a function of carbon particle size, chlorine disinfectant species and concentration (and temperature and pH). Times can vary greatly.

Water geek

punkin

Useless fact of the day.

Kapea

Not for anyone tempted to use the misleading table shown above.

AceNZ

How many liters of 40 to 50% are you able to run through the filter bed before the carbon needs to be recharged or replaced?

grim

I've been loving powdered carbon lately, but it's significantly more complex to use. Treating is easy. Add carbon, stir, wait. Filtering the carbon out requires some heavy lifting. For the first part, you only need a vessel, big old pot, etc. I suspect you could put together a relatively cost effective 3 stage filter - 10 micron, 5 micron, 1 micron - using low cost poly water filters.

Kapea

Is 5 micron not fine enough to get good clarity? That is the porosity used to keep silt from fouling RO membranes, and as prefiltration for UV disinfection.

grim

Commercially it's not uncommon to go sub-micron for final polishing. It makes a difference.

Kapea

Filters all the flavor right on outta there!

CothermanDistilling

I gave up on carbon and focused on the distillation... It actually took flavors from one batch to the next that I did not want, so IMHO, you need to wash/bake it every batch... may do another test someday...

That being said, having good luck with the 1.0u poly filters, even on my whiskey (except the cask strength that I let a little carbon get into for that authentic feel.... might try the .22 after the 1.0u on vodka next time zero taste difference I can tell with filters...

grim

If Filtration 'Strips' Wine, What's Getting Stripped?

The standard unit for measuring porosity in pad and membrane filters is the micron, a millionth of a meter, equivalent to roughly 0.00004 inch. A pencil dot is about 40 microns in diameter; a yeast cell is about 3. Sterile filtration--tight enough to catch the smallest bacteria normally found in wine--is defined as a porosity of .45 micron. That's pretty small. But the largest molecule with a flavor impact that Roger Boulton of the University of California, Davis, could think of is thaumatin, a synthetic sugar substitute, which comes in at about one twentieth of a micron--.05, well under .45. If you wanted to doctor your wine with thaumatin, filtration wouldn't take it out. When chemists get down to the molecular level, they stop talking about length and focus on molecular weight (MW), and the units morph from microns to Daltons. This is the realm where the usual suspects in wine chemistry reside. According to Boulton, molecules of sugars and acids come in at about 150-180 MW units; aromatic terpenes at about 300; most phenolics around 400. Tannins can range from 1,000 to 2,000, maybe 5,000; proteins in white wines can get up to 40,000, and polysaccharides to 100,000. But that .45-micron opening is the equivalent of about 600,000 MW units--an almost gargantuan opening for the comparatively teensy wine flavor molecules to breeze through.

Kapea

We were talking about filtering out residual PAC, right?
0.45 microns will plug up if you even whisper "carbon dust" in the same room. ;)

Kapea

@CothermanDistilling said: I gave up on carbon and focused on the distillation...

Bingo!

My ole pappy used to say, "If'n you gotta filter your spirits, you ain't a distiller, you's a filterer!"

punkin

My Ol Pappy used to say 'If you got a useful tool in your tool belt and refuse to use it in case you look silly, then you ain't no more betta than a damn fool.'

Kapea

He sounds like an Aussie makin a bad try at speakin Southern. ;)

jacksonbrown

The standard unit for measuring porosity in pad and membrane filters is the micron

I depends a lot on the membrane type (RO, NF , MF, UF...)
Most of the membranes I used to work with were rated for MWCO, so Da or kDa (kilo Daltons) for protein fractionation.
I theory you could do away with the carbon and filter out the undesirable components directly but I don't think you'll find a viable way to do that at this scale.
Kap would know better but at the RO end it's all about throughput and rejection rate and way up the other end of the scale it's usually Mesh

Kapea

With RO there is a lot of attention paid to the silt density index and the limiting salt in the feedwater (raw water). The limiting salt is the dissolved solid that reaches saturation concentration first.

With standard filtration all of the filtrate (including dissolved solids) passes through the filter media. Suspended solids are retained on the filter media (except particles smaller than the filter pores - which pass through the filter).

With reverse osmosis and nanofiltration all of the suspended solids are removed prior to exposure to the membranes to prevent membrane fouling. Then a portion of the water is pushed through the membrane which rejects most of the dissolved solids. A portion of the water stays on the feedwater side of the membrane to carry away the dissolved solids that were rejected by the membrane.

The purified water is called permeate (because it has permeated the membrane). The rejected dissolved solids and remainder of the water is called concentrate (because half of the water has been removed, but all of the dissolved solids remain).

Reverse osmosis and nanofiltration are filtration on an ionic or molecular scale. Reverse osmosis, nanofiltration, ultrafiltration, microfiltration are all ratings of the pore size of the membranes and/or relative molecular weights of the rejected solids.

(chart pore size units = nanometers)
@Punkin please note: Giardia oocysts are retained on a 5 micron (5000nm) filter ;)

grim

I find that all the plastic involved in RO makes the water taste funny.

jacksonbrown

DI water tastes crap anyway. You're ment to put stuff back into the water. It hurts the lines too.

Kapea

No it doesn't. If you have corrosive RO water, your operator is incompetent.

Kapea

Rainwater is more pure than RO permeate. People can't get enough of it.

jacksonbrown

Bullshit. Not the RO systems I've worked on.

Kapea

Well there you go then.

punkin

@Kapea said: Well there you go then.

:))