Originally posted by lowriderzzz
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My WMO distillation unit has run on about 1500watts, and it takes about 4 hours to complete the distillation of 5 gallons (20L) of WMO.
Peek power gain with my 30 130watt solar panels during the summer has been 120AMPs, or 3000watts during the 4 hours of peek gain from 10AM to 2PM.
After the spring equinox the gain fell off to 90AMPs, which is about 2000 watts during the peek gain hours of only 11AM-1PM, so there is simply not enough gain now to run my WMO distillation unit, so I have dismantled it and I am rebuilding it. I also have plans to improve my solar system so that I will have enough gain even in the winter to run the unit.
Also, my future upgrades for my WMO distillation unit are likely to require 6KW, and possibly as much as 21KW in short bursts, this is in part why I have 3 3500watt inverters.
One strategy that I plan to employ is staged heating of my condenser traps. The boiler will be the first system to receive heat. Once it comes up to its control point, then the PID controllers will introduce a duty cycle that will quickly become 50% or less on/off. At that point I plan to turn on the heaters for my first trap. This means at points in this cycle the watt demand could be 3000 watts.
All of the heated condenser traps will have been heated by the vapor stream coming from the retort/boiler, so that bring the first trap up to its control point should not take a lot of power, or time. Once the first trap is at its control point, then the boiler PID controllers will be reduced to the first traps control point. At this point the heaters for the second heated trap will be turned on, and so forth until the last heated trap has achieved its control point, then turned off.
I have 3 heated condenser traps. each 5-gallon (20L) boiler and condenser has 1500 watt heaters. This means at any given point all of the heaters could be on for a second or so, which means a momentary power demand of 6000watts.
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