Now a lot of people will scoff at working with ethanol for a lot of reasons... but swim like adapting things so he can work with it, even if it means its not AS effective. People seem to use Acetone when they could just use ethanol. I dont get it personally... there seems no advantage to that.
The best thing about ethanol is that you can make it at home... and no one is the wiser...
For a simple look at how to make your own home made hooch/solvent
check out the easy still... its like making coffee!

http://easystill.com/
You dont have to worry about evaporating toxic solvents, and evaping ethanol can easily happen indoors.
There are advantages as well as disadvantages for sure... But THis is where i think learning the skills of herbalism come in really handy.

???

acetone is a normal human metabolite
it's fine to avoid toxic chemicals... but at least know which are really toxic, and which aren't.

I must second benzyme's post... pure acetone is not toxic and it evaps clean, is a normal human metabolite and present in small amount in fruits and so on.

In any case, thanks for the input! I would love to get a still

I still dont want to breath it... I never said acetone was toxic, I talked about toxic solvents in general.... but let me ask you this smarmey ones... would you take a shot of acetone or any of your other solvents?

How much does it cost to produce a, say litre of ethanol when using easystill? How much more (or less) ecological is that compared to the production of the same amount of industrially produced ethanol?

Even though it feels more ecological to create some things at home, industrialisation basically means bulk production and thus better yield/input energy efficiencies.

how much does it cost... well... a bag of sugar and some turbo yeast is your biggest cost continually.
The ecological foot print is going to be much smaller in the long run. I am not sold on the idea that it is other wise a smaller ecological foot print when it comes to industrial produced ethanol. You are still going to have an ecological foot print from the sugar and yeast but you would have that any way. Sugar can be replaced by harvesting fruits and such and then just further distilling and distilling until you get a very pure product. If you live in an agricultural area for example you can actually get say grape slurry thats been allready pressed and use that.... hell you can grow your own tatters!

No, it's not.

A kilo of sugar coming at around $0.80-£0.80 at cheapest price will give you by fermentation a total of ~600ml ethanol. And yes, you can find alternatives to it, e.g. potatoes as you said even though with potatoes it gets more complicated for starch->sugars conversion (so that you have more fermentables to begin with, I presume you're knowledge on brewing, no?) so more input required here. All in all however, sugars is not the greatest cost. The greatest cost is distilling it as well as producing a distillate of at least 95%.

I ask again, what is the cost of it?

That easystill is pretty cool. Keep in mind that it’s completely illegal in some places to distill alcohol without a permit. But who’s really going to know anyway.

Why is the purity lower than 50% for the first run? That’s not so good, but good enough for making tinctures I imagine.

I appreciate the critical reasoning your trying to bring, infundibulum! Its definitely very important, we know that behind a lot of what is marketed as 'natural', there are a lot of incoherencies and actually unsustainable practices. Indeed we gotta always try to measure in a broader way. But it would be hard to put in numbers the energy consumption/ecological footprint of a liter of industrially produced ethanol (counting all the transport and the containers and indirect costs).

Would be good if products in general had by law to specify its ecological footprint on the label


As for the easystill, could it distill other solvents well? like limonene and so on? It says its possible for 'essential oils'.. It says safety switch goes off at 142c.. what would be an appropriate limonene distilling temperature? or for overall use maybe better get some generic distilling apparatus?

D-limonene can be distilled with water, and then it separates as the distillate collects. All you need is to boil the water, so 100 C is enough if there is water present. Otherwise without water you have to bring it to the boiling point of D-limonene, which is much higher than 100 C (I forget the temperature exactly).

Thats awesome!
There is a new trend this year, I am seeing lots of cold weather northern hemipshere citrus trees being sold. Curiously how much citrus peels do you think would be needed to make some limo? I guess you could also make a deal with the local jamba juice lol, recycle their trash!

You tell me then? What us the cost of the distilling? your electric or gas bill?
I am using the easy still as the example.

Endlessness, yes; a bottle of store-bought ethanol usually costs as much as its price indicates (minus the tax of course!!!!). This includes ethanol production, quality control (VERY IMPORTANT), bottling, transportation, middlemen costs and grocery stocking + profit etc. As for calculating the energy footprint of all these processes, this is a mental mayhem!

Home made ethanol makes all these sortcuts but fails into efficiency (you will not really get 95% at home unless you really want to try hard and it also fails into quality control; yeast produce all sorts of metabolites apart form ethanol, brewers know this very well. Some bacterial contamination or yeast mishandling will cause oxidation of ethanol to acetic acid. So be prepared with how you brew and what you'll get in the end of the still. your ethanol may be somewhat acidic. Other metabolites include the ethyl acetate and diacetyl, both of which co-distil with ethanol. On the other hand, just as with industrially produced ethanol calculating total costs for comparison is a total mental mayhem.

In sort I believe that the idea is nice but nothing more than hippie pipe-dreams. The product of a home still IS good for making drinking spirit and tinctures as ron correctly pointed but it is not so good for making an all around solvent for extractions. I'd trust the store-bought anytime.

I don't know. I think a whole truck load for a few gallons of d-limonene?

don't know what to answer you here, plus your second period lacks verb so I don't understand what you say. You posted in the ecofriendly section so I ask where do you see the eco-friendliness. You promote (the idea!), I enquire and you answer the questions here.

Those damn hippies.... lol

Its your critique!? You back it up! And way to be rude about typos... jesus man... be nice.
I asked you where you see the costs being higher at home verses buying at a store. And calling hippies is just mean... lol

Sorry if I come off as rude, I really do not mean it. I'm as jolly as jolly can be.

Also I don't make critique, I enquire.

Lol... ok... well if you say that it will cost more... and I say it does not... then you say it will, I would say at that point maybe you could tell me why it would cost more? lol

Really? did I say it'll cost more? Please quote my words that say that because I couldn't find them and I feel confused.