more meth recovery

[yaric008]

It's funny, we made our first batch the other week and everything went pretty much fine, and this week we are making our next batch and everything has just gone to hell, lol. I've had to fix everything, in the processes we attempted to upgrade our methanol recovery unit but apparently we've just made it not work somehow. Back to the drawing board on that one eh...?

Anyways, i got my methanol hydrometer finally and tested the methanol we recovered from the first batch and the specific gravity came out to .790 and the pure stuff out of our drum at the same temperature was .786. So is the recovered stuff pure enough to use again for the next batch and can i just pour this back in our drum?

[Spencnaz]

You will have to mix the recovered methanol with new as you will not get a complete transesterfication reaction with recovered methanol.

Even properly recovered methanol is going to have some water in it, reducing its potency.

How is your recovery condenser designed? A simple copper line with crimps in it every 6" is more than adequate to get the methanol to condense right into a sealed container.

[yaric008]

We are using a small air conditioner we had to pull methanol vapor in and run it through the condenser coil to condense the methanol, works pretty well now that we got it working.