Beginner's Guide #6 Heating Stills /determine BTUs for Propane

welcome that is the sound that's made by 165 thousand BTUs yes so it should be pretty obvious yep today's topic heat all kinds of all methods welcome back I'm George we're so happy you're here this is number six of our beginners guide to distilling um or brewing or whatever your hobby may be there I'm sure there's some information here that will lend itself to whatever it is you're doing so let's get on with it now when it comes to heating us we're gonna talk about stills in particular when it comes to heating us still of course you have many many options but it's up to you to select the proper option that's available to you that's economic enough for you in something that you understand and you can control now we've already seen the gosh this is just a great big cooker and then all that is is just one line that goes through that's propane and that's one hundred sixty five thousand BTUs why is that number important hmm we're going to get into that because that number means a lot instead of just comparing yours to somebody else's now a standard turkey fryer that you get you know those ones you buy at a Walmart in a box or different places you know the small turkey first those one usually around 35 to 50,000 BTUs all right that's just a data point for you so they'll kind of give you an idea of what's available out there they run up to and of course they get more expensive but you can get them up to two hundred thousand two hundred twenty thousand BTUs and uh that's a Bridget British thermal unit and it's a method for measuring tempo heat transfer really so it's thermals ah this one has oh in particular if you're going to use propane when you heat is still this has a diffuser plate here that swings right over top of the flame it's a small one but it'll work with that does a diffuser causes the flame to separate spread out so that the heat dissipates out and then up instead of straight up because otherwise it would be a blowtorch so it's really helpful if you had like an eighth inch sheet of Steel that you place on top and use that as a diffuser okay aluminum will work steel will work a regular you know just good piece of metal that will diffuse heat uh because the last thing that you want to have happen is you want don't want to place a still on top of that and all of a sudden everything starts to stink and real bad because you're scorching everything on the inside you want to try to dissipate that heat evenly and smoothly okay now it brings us to our next one of our other options is of course the new wave cooktop this is a magnetic induction cooker and as long as you've got a magnetic bottom to the pot itself when you put it on here and turn it on this thing will heat it up a little bit slower but it will work and this is an 1800 watt model what does 1800 watts me yeah we're gonna get to that it's a number that's really really important to you so this one will work on up to a certain amount how's that and then of course another option that you have one of those boilers and some of them come configured like stills you see this is one that's got here's my control knob and it plugs in and normally they have somewhere around fifteen or sixteen hundred watt element in them and these work extremely well as well there are some kickbacks to them but you know it is what it is it's a method of introducing energy heat all of these are now are there other way absolutely gosh you can use what we've got propane you can use just gas LNP LPN liquid petroleum oh whatever LPG like a petroleum gas uh you can use coal you can use wood you know any anything that's going to produce heat that you can manipulate and or direct into is still how's that yeah I know we're getting somewhere now when I see the head start denied now if I set this aside here I bring this this is my three gallon mighty meeting I just want to use this as a as an example because it has a port in the side because another one of your options is heating elements this is a heating element and we'll describe more about heating elements high density low density 240 s1 20s all those things at different wattages because they all mean something and this was slide right into the side and when you would use that to do the same thing that happens in your water heater your water heater has these in them and controlled properly this will heat a still smoothly evenly and appropriately okay alright here's something we need that we do need to understand and it's all it has to do with thermal dynamics and heat transfer is that as soon as you enter he introduced heat into this still there's only one purpose in life that that heat is working at and that is getting the hell out true it's it will dissipate as quickly or faster that you can put it in so your energy in must be higher than your energy loss in order for you to get any results see that's why when we start talking about larger size stills we're talking about things like larger size elements larger capabilities of elements can you imagine if you had a 500 watt element and you put that in a 20 gallon still how long would it take that 500 watt element to heat that still well that still would lose energy faster than it is gaining energy and you would never get it up to temperature it would do all it could possibly do and then that would just sit there so you see it does make a difference now as this happens the only thing you can do is try to control and we talked about this in the other video or the outside influences and what are they well first of all it's the atmosphere and wind a breeze you know sometimes people have an air conditioner blowing on it not a good idea and there's a couple of things you can do the first thing is real simple is to insulate it now stand by let me grab something now when you when you go to insulate your still it may look awful odd but in the long run it's going to pay off dividends now do you have to actually insulate it not no because we're gonna make sure that you know how to calculate in putting enough energy to overcome the loss of energy so you can run your still but if you want to control that be a little bit more economical hmm I have a better flow it just let you know you never know um there's there are ways that you can control the outside environment okay all right I've got this I bought this recently because it's time to eat oh we do some of my still now you know about that my G still the column and the kettles are already insulated they're insulated from the factory so I don't have to do anything to them it's the other ones that I get oops and this is just a thin piece of fiberglass and it's a fiberglass insulation it's pipe wrap I've got that and I've also got a roll of this other wrap oh yes and this is great because the the the the temperature tolerance both of these is high enough that I don't have to worry about it and this just peels back just like tape and there we go and wraps around so you can wrap it around you can first you can wrap with this and then wrap around with that it told me up to you or you can just stick with this it's a matter of fact the r-value here is a this has an hour value of one point six and an hour value is the ability to resist thermal transfer you know heat going either way so he didn't stays in heat out stays out and the same thing with the tape so you could do that and I've got to do that to the remainder of my stills for this season let's move on and we'll discuss in more detail some information about how to select the proper heating element or heating source we are back and I will try my best to keep this as straightforward and easy as possible but we have to understand some terms to get started now you know I've got the board what's that mean yeah we've got sorry we got to do just a little bit of math mark this point on the video in case you need to come back because I'm gonna give you everything you need to know to figure out what your requirements are so please don't call me and ask me to do your math for you happens all the time I don't mind helping you know that but look if you if I'm gonna show you how to do it then why don't I just say hey call me and I'll fill you in let's talk about something else okay oh no we talked about BTUs British thermal units BTU it's some measurement okay and it's a base measurement what's a bit what is a BTU of BTU be tea and au is the amount of energy required to raise one pound o of water by one degree Fahrenheit that's what a BTU is okay and everything kind of bases around that so if we know that and we know a few other things then we know what our requirements would be this believe it or not this is a whole lot simpler than you may think it is I know you use BTUs before you've used the terminology air conditioners window air conditioners especially they come rate it in BTUs well furnaces some furnaces are radiative BTUs of course he had gas propane electric blood at the end of the day they're all gonna be rated in BTUs at some in some way or some fashion so ah you see we're gonna raise it says a pound of water all we need to know is what is a pound of water how much does a pound of water away well we owe up weighs a pound all right but we're going to be working with gallons almost lost myself we're gonna be working with gallons so how much does a gallon way yeah you're right one gallon oh man weighs 8.33 pounds so we know that now all right we know that so if it takes one BTU to raise one pound one of these pounds by one degree Fahrenheit how many BTUs does it take to raise a gallon go ahead and think about that and I'll just give you a hint yeah it requires 8.33 BTUs per gallon to raise a gallon by one degree Fahrenheit we got everything we need now the only thing left is what are you working with hmm let me get my calculator thing comes in handy all right let's say for instance you've got you a five gallon still all right and this is a total of five gallons now for you at Europeans and I understand I know you're you use a different please just go ahead and do the conversions it's not that hard so I'm not gonna offer them on this video because they're just it I get confused when I start doing both of them so maybe we'll do one separate who knows with just straight metric okay if I know I got five gallons of water I know about the weight because I know one gallon is eight point three three pounds how much does five gallons way oh that would be five times eight point three three equals I'm do this with you forty one point six five so that's forty one point six five pounds of water okay that's for us we just need to know that now so I'm gonna take this five gallons I already know what it takes to raise one of them I have five gallons now what is the temperature right now but they're very sake of argument okay let's say for instance that inside here it is 75 degrees Fahrenheit now how hot don't want to get it now most of us want to get all at the we can go to boiling but let's just stop it 180 just for sake of argument okay we want to get this to a hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheit okay so I got five gallons right now at seventy-five what I want in the end is I want five gallons at 180 what's the difference between the two in temperature 75 from 180 is 95 that's what that's the difference okay I want to raise this by 95 degrees okay I want to raise it by 95 degrees Fahrenheit so far so good okay if I want to raise it 95 of these ones I would have to multiply something by that I want to do it 95 times okay so cuz I'm gonna raise a pound by one degree or 8.33 gaw pounds in a gallon okay so I'm gonna raise that one pound of water by one degree I'm gonna do this but 95 but here's what I need to do then I need to go 95 times my five gallons cuz I want to do it one gallon at a time but all together okay and when I've knew that what else if I got to multiply it by since one gallon takes 8.33 BTUs I got to multiply it by eight point three three that's your formula or better written probably would be gallons times rise and temp times 8.33 they both mean the same thing let's do this Oh 95 is your the degrees times 5 gallons I want to do that five four five different gallons altogether times eight point three three which is the number of BTUs equals did you get the same thing I got I get 39:56 seventy-five 39:56 seventy-five BTU required to raise that five gallons by ninety five degrees in one hour no we're not done I see you scratching your head there no we're not done what would happen if we had to do ten gallons well well then just replace this number with ten do ten gallons now this only tells us what the requirement is in BTUs we've got to get to the next step ninety five times ten times eight point three three that one equals oh there we go seventy-nine one three point five zero BTUs now so what that tells us is if you had seven thousand nine hundred thirteen BTUs in one hour you could raise five gallons of water 95 degrees Oh milk ten gallons at this point that for that one if you had three thousand nine hundred fifty six BT use constant you could raise five gallons by 95 degrees in one hour see where we are now we're in that ballpark so let's we need a little bit more room up here oh my goodness propane is not as if it were we talked about that earlier in the video about some of the outside influences whenever you start to introduce heat into an object what's it doing the first thing that he wants to do is get the hell out so you got if you can't control that use your heat loss will overcome depending on how much energy you're introducing could overcome your heat introduction and you will never get there no matter how many BTUs you well yeah but if your BTUs were not high enough okay now we already know that a turkey fryer a regular turkey fryers about 35 to 50,000 BTUs that's more than enough to raise that five gallons up to up by ninety five degrees we know that okay but that's in a perfect environment now you have to take in consideration your influences now if you're running it at what 60% efficiency my first guess would be to immediately double either one of these depending on the size of your five gallons what's at 39 times 2 almost at least 10,000 BTUs in this one almost 20,000 BTUs look you want to have enough energy going in that the energy loss is not going to overcome that energy in so a 35,000 BTU turkey fryer would do it that 165 thousand BTU turkey fryer does it good and does it quick so this would all take place in that one hour you can anticipate all right Nestle gives you a planning figure now what happens when we wrap it in an insulation we protected from dissipating Heat well one or two things are going to happen if you've done it wrong and you've got that insulation to low you burn it remember it will resist heat it doesn't resist a lot of fire okay but if you get it insulated well and you're not losing a lot of heat well then that will happen all in one hour but that's just for a planning figure for you so I'll just be cautious and understand what a BTU is the British thermal unit and understand what the effects are how many it takes now the next video we do we're going to go right into electricity because BTUs and lots have a whole lot in common and yep we can figure out a little bit closer because of the 95 percent efficiency of electricity heater elements so with propane we're working at anywhere between 60 to 75 percent efficiency because of heat loss so you've got to make sure that you include that in your program again at 35,000 watt of 35,000 BTU of turkey fryers more than enough it's just going to take a whole hour you want to do it faster increase your BTUs mmm I hope you're getting something out of this real simple you can do it at home you can do it by again temperature change times the number of gallons times 8.33 which is the weight of a gallon will give you the BTUs required in order to raise that that amount of temperature okay both see you on the next video I think you'll enjoy that one just as much as this one mmm okay yeah I know yeah happy to still

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 61,662

Keywords: neutral spirit, sugar wash, barlerandhops, hops, home, Sugar (Ingredient), sugar mash, distilling, barley, corn sugar vs cane sugar, corn sugar mash recipe, making a wash for distilling, running a still for the first time, first distillation, using yeast, mooshine, whiskey, making rum, making vodka, bourbon, baby step bourbon, making bourbon at home

Id: _O6T8RrOrk4

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 27 2019