Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Poor locked-down man's distillation apparatus :)

Keras - 30-4-2020 at 04:29

When you're on lockdown away from your chemistry lab… you have to wing it! :)

The plastic straw actually runs through the plastic water bottle which acts as a condenser…





IMG_0536.jpeg - 1.2MB

B(a)P - 30-4-2020 at 11:40

This is brilliant! Obviously only good for low temperatures. How did it go?

draculic acid69 - 30-4-2020 at 19:42

Nice. I've thought about running a ss/copper tube vertically through a coke bottle with hose attachments screwed in.

Refinery - 1-5-2020 at 01:46

Mood when producing moonshine in prison.

mackolol - 1-5-2020 at 02:32

What are you going to distill in this?

Keras - 1-5-2020 at 03:11

The thing holds its own for simple distilled water preparation. It's definitely lacking water circulation though, so the water ends up lukewarm at the top and stays cool at the bottom. Also, the lower hole is leaky, but I found I could mitigate it by capping the bottle tight (it still drips, especially when the bottle warms up).

Well I was trying next to get some concentrated ethanol out of wine. That was a resounding failure. All I got was somewhat lightly flavoured water, but no alcohol. I wonder where it has gone. I'm going to open a thread about this.

I'll try to use it to purify denatured alcohol that is sold as fuel for alcohol burners. Will see.

I did also make a makeshift alcohol burner out of a glass can with a metal lid (and shoe lace as wick), but that turned out to be a bad idea, and I got my wooden table charred.

mackolol - 1-5-2020 at 05:55

Ooh man... I would be too lazy to try something like that, but anyways nice experiment.

Keras - 1-5-2020 at 08:04

Quote: Originally posted by mackolol  
Ooh man... I would be too lazy to try something like that, but anyways nice experiment.


This time it worked. It took me three runs, but I was definitely able to get a mixture ethanol/water rich enough in ethanol to be ignited by a match. Starting with 100 ml of 14% wine, I ended up with a few drops less than 10 ml concentrated ethanol, which is not so bad, considering than there was 14 ml in the starting beverage.

mackolol - 1-5-2020 at 10:08

Quote: Originally posted by Keras  

This time it worked. It took me three runs, but I was definitely able to get a mixture ethanol/water rich enough in ethanol to be ignited by a match. Starting with 100 ml of 14% wine, I ended up with a few drops less than 10 ml concentrated ethanol, which is not so bad, considering than there was 14 ml in the starting beverage.


O man, I see business coming. Cheapest wines in Poland are like ~1$ per 0.7 L so it's very good deal :cool: . You can patent your own way of ethanol purification.

Keras - 1-5-2020 at 10:55

Quote: Originally posted by mackolol  

O man, I see business coming. Cheapest wines in Poland are like ~1$ per 0.7 L so it's very good deal :cool: . You can patent your own way of ethanol purification.


Yeah, especially with a 250 ml beaker. :P I don't even want to know how much time it would take me to distil a mere single bottle… I have no idea how cheap is a bottle of plonk in France, but certainly not that cheap.

I burnt all the ethanol I'd made. Everything gone in a fleeting blue flame…