How to Make Essential Oils at Home

Would you like to exchange your recipes how to make essential oils at home with other oil makers? Everything in this forum revolves around essential oil recipes. Please observe our forum rules (see Helpful tips on use).

June 2018:

It has now been an unbelievable 16 years (!) since the last major change to the website and forums. When you think that two to three years are an eternity for the Internet sector, that is really something. In any case, there has been so much going on in terms of technology that it has become urgently necessary to completely redesign not only the forums, but also the entire website, from scratch and bring the programming up to date. Naturally, along with this we also introduced various new features; for example it was high time we allowed pictures to be uploaded with a forum post too or enabled users to subscribe to the forums via RSS feeds. And of course we have subsequently included pictures that are saved on external websites and were then integrated here using an img tag, so that no valuable information is lost. In any case, we hope you continue to have fun swapping experiences and trying things out.

Juni 2002:

At this point, we would first like to extend a big thank-you to all the users of our specialist questions for their lively involvement. Without you, we could never have developed such an informative and high-quality reference guide in such a short time (the first post dates from April 8, 1999). The large number of posts and high numbers of visitors made it necessary for us to develop the specialist questions ourselves using PHP and MySQL (at last no more annoying advertising banners!). During the course of this, we have hopefully introduced several improvements.

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So, that’s it. We hope you have a lot of fun swapping experiences, reading, posting and naturally also trying things out afterwards. Dr Malle & Dr Schmickl Dr. Malle & Dr. Schmickl

Long Distillation Time, No Oil

ben am 09.12.2019 12:46:34 | Region: vt
We distilled approximately 6.5lbs of oranges, smelt great, it filled about three bottles. I put a cork on the top of the bottles, it has been three days, I don’t see any separation of oil on the top. Please let me know if this is normal with citrus. The amount of water poured into the still was 1 ½ liters. The water was at a high boil. The distilling process from start to finish was approximately 2 ½ hours.

RE: Long Distillation Time, No Oil

Udo am 09.12.2019 12:48:03 | Region: Berlin

Your distillation time is far too long. Normally it takes about 45 minutes (inclusive the time to bring the water to a boil) to collect 500 ml of hydrosol when using 1.5 liters of water. Although your stove is 8,000 BTU, the heat is not strong enough, the dripping frequency is not really fast. We use electrical hot plates with 1500 W (which is about 5500 BTU), so maybe the heat should be distributed more across the kettel’s bottom. The yield depends on the fruit, it's somewhere between 1 and 8 ml essential oil.