LARGE ESSENTIAL OIL
STEAM DISTILLATION KITS

10 gallon/33 liter Bio-capacity
(Made entirely of food grade Stainless Steel)

 
 

The best BIG system for making your own STEAM DISTILLED essential oils! Our new line of large gas-fired essential oil steam distillers has been designed from the ground up to be the perfect steam distillation system for medium sized needs. Many departures have been made from "standard" steam distiller designs which results in highly improved performance and maintainability. Look closely at the picture at right.  This is not just a "can" full of boiling water and plants:

Totally simple to load and unload... you remove the quick-disconnect condenser, pop the top of the boiler, lift out the biocan, turn it upside down and unclip it's perforated lid, and load or dump your biomass! There is enough room between the bottom of the biocan and the boilers' bottom to hold about four gallons of water. Two gallons is more than plenty to do most distillation runs. We've found that with most plants after about 4-6 liters of hydrosol have been produced, the distillation process is done. Note: If you need to distill for longer periods of time, we can provide an optional float valve inside the boiling chamber that will keep the boiling water level constant for as long as you care to distill.

The unit's simple condenser design is also a departure from the usual large still condenser. Quite different than most most industry condensers, our simple vertical condenser works like this: Steam and oil vapors run up thru the center tube and exit inside at the top of the condensing chamber. From there the vapors are forced downward where they encounter the cold cooling coils, causing them to condense and drip down to the bottom exit pipe. We run our cooling coils "inside-out" -- our cooling water runs inside the coils and the steam distillate is on the outside of the coils. This results in many benefits:

(1) The condenser offers no restriction to the steam, thus creates zero system backpressure, so everything operates at atmospheric pressure (amongst other benefits, this keeps the temperature rock steady at 100c)
(2) The surface area of a tube is much greater on the outside than the inside. By running the water inside the coiled tube and the steam on the outside of it, the maximum cold surface area possible is available to the steam. This plus the fact that there is actually 20 feet + of tubing coiled up results in an incredibly efficient condenser that is physically much smaller than any comparitive setups.
(3) The condenser is super easy to take apart for cleaning... Most other large condensers are either welded or bolted together and cannot be easily cleaned. Because our system is a "no pressure" system, there's no need to have a completely sealed condenser- so you simply slip the outer shell up and off; the entire innards is right there for you to clean, and you can actually get to every place your distillate touches! (you certainly couldn't do that if the steam went inside the coil as many other stills do!) No more having to run raw steam thru the system to "hope" it gets cleaned out (this is the only way to clean welded stainless steel condensers --.yuck!)
(4) Our compact vertical condenser design and quick disconnects make our distiller take up less floor space and keeps the system compact. simple, and easy to assemble and disassemble.

One last interesting option (offered separately)  is a "finishing condenser." In all distillation systems, the condenser cooling water is solely responsible for condensing the steam and keeping your oils cold. This means you have to be pumping enough cold water thru the condenser to make it do its job properly. You can usually just use tap water, but for some of the more delicate fragrences this might not be cold enough. The concept is that you're trying to get the condenser water to remove some 20,000 BTU of energy from the distillate AND keep the condensate cold all in one pass, which is fine for many operations, but for some of the "lighter" fragrent oils, it's absolutely necessary to keep the condenser VERY cold. So you have to use ice water or a chiller to cool your condenser. Because this ice water has to remove the entire heat of distillation, it takes a tremendous amount of ice or other cooling power to keep things cold enough -- usually totally impractical in a system of this size. What to do? In the stainless steel system, you can simply replace the glass take-off pipe that goes from the condenser to the receiver with our optional glass "finishing condenser", which is cooled separately from the main condenser with its own ice-chilled water and pump. This way, the main condenser can do the big work, removing the "heat of distillation" with simple tap water, and the secondary "finishing" glass condenser will chill your distillate very easily with a separate bucket of ice water and a small pump. Since the main condenser has already done the lions' share of the "work", the finishing condenser is actually removing very little heat from the already cool distillate, so it takes very little cooling power to do it's work effectively! The receiver for the stainless units is glass and is similar to the very successful design we use in our glass distillers with a few key differences:
 

(1) An innovative way of draining out the collected oil:
Because the overall flow of this distiller is so much greater than that of our smaller sets, the receiver must be a lot taller to ensure all of the oil collects and stays floating on top of the water in the receiver. Because of the receivers increased length, draining the oil out the bottom valve when you're done would leave a lot of it stuck on the inner sidewalls of the receiver, since the layer of oil would need to be taken all the way to the bottom to be removed. Our newest innovation is the creation of a "virtual funnel" which is created using the side-valve and it's inside drain tube, which resides just under the oil layer. It works like this: you open the side valve and drain out the bit of water that resides under the oil layer as it collects. As soon as the bottom of the oil layer touches the drain tube, surface tension between the layers creates a virtual funnel... all of the oil now drains smoothly out of the side valve and when it's done, everything automatically stops!! It is very easy to do, and impossible to "go too far" and get water in your oil container, and you don't need to take the oil all the way to the bottom of the receiver to get it out. In addition, you can even draw oil out of the receiver while distillation is underway. .................... ................. 

(2) Excellent separation: During normal operation, oil blobs flow into the receiver and collect on the surface of the water in the receiver. However some of them ("escapees") find their way below the oil layer before floating to the top and joining the layer. The glass "bubble" that you see blown into the side of the receiver acts as an internal "waterfall" to induce turbulence into the downward-flowing water, about halfway down the receiver. This turbulence causes any escaping oil blobs to start floating upwards, and helps insure that oil cannot get down to the bottom where it might escape via the hydrosol outlet. Otherwise the receiver is basically the same as our smaller ones. The oil and hydrosol are automatically separated; oil collects inside the receiver and floats on top of the water, and hydrosol continuously drains out of the side port.

(3) Ease of Setup: The condenser, the receiver and the takeoff tube all have spherical ground glass joints, allowing for absolutely simple hookup and no chance of breakage due to misalignment.

From burner turn-on, It takes about 2 hours to produce 4-6 liters of hydrosol and whatever oil is contained in the plant. This uses, not surprisingly, about 4-6 liters of boiling water. We always load the can with 3 gallons just to be on the safe side. The propane tank will go at least 5-6 distillations before needing to be refilled.


WHAT COMES WITH THIS UNIT

• Complete distiller as shown in the photos above.

• The distiller, condenser, and bio-container.

• 20,000 BTU propane burner with hose and regulator.

• Receiver, clamps and stand.

• Take-off pipe.

• Two Pyrex 1Liter flat bottom flasks to collect hydrosol.

• All glass parts as shown in above photos.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• An outside area or well ventilated sheltered area to use the distiller, on non-flamable flooring! (The burner is an "outdoor only" item, not recommended for indoor use. Note that the burner gets hot and could easily burn a wood or flammable surface concrete is great as a surface to put the distiller on -- or a sheet of half-inch thick tile-backing material known as "wonderboard" from Home Depot makes an excellent fireproof surface. Units with the electrically powered option may be used indoors with good ventilation, and do not need to be run on fireproof floors because they don't get as hot on the bottom as do the gas fired versions.)
• Garden hoses for condenser water.
• 5 Gallon BBQ tank of propane. 
• Plant material.