5 Gal (2 Pots)

Worked well, wish the coil was a bit better but price is good and the pot quality was was better than I thought. Almost Worth the price for the huge pot alone I think.

Great starter kit

So far it has worked great. Came on time and was easy to set up and operate. The only thing that I had difficulty with the temperature control in Celsius.

I own a few different typesI absolutely loved using itI am looking at purchasing two moreWell worth the money

There were several conflicting reviews, bit the only issue I noticed was that the overflow line for the coil cooling pot was undersized, and would regularly overflow the minute you took your eyes off of it no matter how much I adjusted the inflow. To help with this I added a valve on the inflow, and bored a wider hole on the outflow which helps, but even with the slightly larger bore hole it occasionally it will not want to drain and overflows. I would recommend boring at least a 3/4"-1" outside diameter hole for the overflow which will make the outflow hole between a1/2"-3/4" inside the fitting, and less likely to not want to drain. I'm still not sure why this happens with set inflow, but it does occasionally. Stills need to be monitored throughout so this shouldn't be an issue if you are being properly attentive.

I'll start with the pros. the temperature gauge on the tank show a temperature that the best I can figure is only .5 degrees c off. This is based on the boiling temperature of filtered water at 5800ft elevation (my elevation) should be 94.2 C but the display reads 93.8. I also have another thermometer attached that reads exactly the same so my calculations could be the cause of the error not the gauge. The auto shutoff feature works great. It leaves just enough water in the tank that you don't get a build up of scale on the bottom from boiling all the water away. The thermostat has a hysteresis of about 7 degree between turning off an turning on. The temperature scale when the water was 93.8 according to the thermometer the thermostat would turn on about 93 and turn off at about 100. The the range changes depending on how fast I turn the knob so a better test would be to check the temperature when it turns off and then back on without moving the dial, but I didn't do that. After using it to distill some vodka it took three distills and I got the alcohol to the maximum 95.5 % abv according to a hydrometer that is traceable to nist. I saved $50 off the price of buying 7 1.75 liters of 190 proof.The cons:I accidentally bought the 9 gallon at first and had to get the 13 gallon later because I need the extra capacity. The 9 gallon plugs into a standard socket and pulls about 13.5 amp which is fine if its the only thing pulling power on that circuit. If you have any other significant loads it will blow a 15 amp circuit breaker. The 13 gallon one on the other hand is a 240 volt with a nema 6-15 plug on it. I had to get a plug for my stove outlet which is nema 14-50 and wire a socket on it for the 6-15 plug. That cost extra.The big problem was cooling the steam. I did not try to hook up the cooler that came with it because I did not want to run water continually down the drain, so I hooked it up to a graham condenser but that was too small. In order to get the graham condenser to work I had to use a pwm module to lower the voltage to 80 and 750 watts to not over load the graham condenser. This worked but took 26 hours to distill 5 gallons of water. What I did next was order $200 worth of parts to make a liquid to air heat exchanger. After sweating some copper fitting onto the heat exchange and adding a duct fan and duct adapter, I was able to distill at full power with plenty of cooling to spare. I used the 9 gallon for this since I still have not gotten the plug ready for the 13 gallon. The water coming out the the heat exchanger I built was only 5 degrees c hotter than the air so it has a cooling efficiency of 280 - 350 watts per degree c. So it should handle the full 2800 watts of the 13 gallon distiller just fine.The reason I did not use the cooler that came with it is because I calculated that you would need 150 gallons of water being heated half way to boiling to distill 9 gallons of water. To heat 9 gallons up to boiling temperature requires 9 gallons x 128 ounces per gallon x 28 grams per ounce x 4.184 joules per gram per degree C x 70 degrees C = 9,447,137.28 joules or watt seconds. at a power of 1800 watts/second it takes 87.47 minutes to heat room temperature water up to boiling. The big problem is it takes 2260 joules to convert 1 gram of water to steam. the total necessary energy to boil 9 gallons is 9 gallons x 128 ounces x 28 grams x 2260 joules/gram which equals 72,898,560 joules or watt-seconds So the total energy to boil 9 gallons of water is 82,345,697 joules or watt-seconds.. This translated into about 10.5 hours to distill 5 gallons. which is pretty efficient as far as time is concerned. Now if you wanted to use the cooler that came with the distiller and you assume you cannot heat the cooling water up more than half way to boiling you divide 82,345,697 by 4.184 joules / degree c / 28 grams /128 ounces / 9 gallons and you get right at 150 gallons of cooling water. This means you have to have a 150 gallon tank of water or let 150 gallons go down the drain if you have it hooked up to a faucet. I consider both of those options to be pretty impractical so I built my own heat exchanger. If cost $200 but works well. At a cost of about $2 per 50 gallons of water it would take me 33 batches of 9 gallons to make my money back just in water savings. That's not including that at my electricity cost it would cost a little over $0.45 per gallon vs $1.26 per gallon at Walmart if you're lucky and they have it in stock. so if you divide $219 for the distiller you make your money back on the distiller in 273 gallons of water or 30.33 9 gallon batches. If you wnat to make you money back on the heat exchanger as well that would take another 250 gallons or 28 9 gallon batches. so about 60 9 galln batches will pay for everything.If you're using this to distill alcohol the number are a lot better Alcohol only take 846 joules per gram to boil. You only have to heat the mixture up to the boiling point of alcohol 78 degree C. And you only have to boil the alcohol not the whole 9 gallons. So if you have a 9 gallon mix of 10% alcohol the numbers look like this 9 x128 x 28 x .9 x 4.184 x 55 + 9 x 128 x 28 x .1 x2.46 x 55 = 6,680,475 + 436,423 = 7,116,898 joules to heat the mixture up. And to boil the alcohol is 9 x 128 x 28 x .1 x 846 = 2,728,857 to boil the 0.9 gallon of alcohol. so the total joules is 9,845,755 joules or watt seconds. which at the rated power of 1800 watts ( which is high there are some losses) would take about 91 minutes and to cool assuming you heat the cooling water 50 degrees c in the process would take about 13 gallons of cooling water.To do this you heat the mixture up until alcohol start to come out then set the thermostat so the it just turns on at that temp. Then you can use a smart plug available here on amazon with power metering function to tell when the thermostat shuts off the heater and turn power off permanently. This way it's mostly automatic.That's the long and the short and the numbers of it.socket i ordered:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0100TC3ZK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1plug i ordered:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L3BMKJP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1Heat exchanger parts: (you may need more than one of some of these part and some come in a pack which may have extras) (note the collar between the duct adapter and the duct fan needs to be modified to fit in between the two by drilling out the spot welds and overlapping the ends. since they all have female ends on them I did not want to pay $50 for a 4 foot 8 inch duct to use instead)https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016Y8MDBA/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09SVHWKPR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FTYR97N/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BQU29M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CF5F91YZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0949MD75C/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BVBW3L12/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JHLWM1B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JHLWM1B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JHLWM1B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JHLWM1B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

No leaks good design very functional great value good build

ball valve on lid broke at thread after only 3 distillations