Also, consuming ethanol at the same time reduces methanol’s toxicity. Presumably this is why meths drinkers are able to continue doing so for some time (‘methylated spirits’ is >90% ethanol).
Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Broadly speaking, when you distil a mixture of liquids, it will boil at a temperature between the boiling points of the components, and your distillate will also contain a mixture of those liquids, according to their proportion in the mixture, and their boiling points.
According to some calculations I did a while ago, a 10% ABV mixture will boil at about 90C, and give a distillate of about 50% ABV. As this goes on, the amount of alcohol remaining will gradually fall off, the boiling point will rise, and by the time you’ve boiled off a third of the mixture, your distillate will be coming out at more like 5% ABV, and your accumulated distillate will be around 30% ABV.
If you stopped earlier, you’d get a stronger drink, but you’d be throwing away more of the ethanol with the water.
If 30% isn’t enough for you, you could distil again- by the time you’d boiled off half of this, distillate would be coming out at about 20% ABV, and you’d have collected a 55% ABV accumulated distillate.
It is a decent substitute if you are where you can’t easily use soap and water, otherwise use soap and water. Though when I have always thought about it, you should wash before going to the bathroom as well, think of all the places your hands have been, keyboards, cell phones, that sneeze, etc (do you work with chemicals? hot peppers?). Where has your junk been? hanging out in your pants not exposed to much of anything.
the problem is that many brands of hand sanitizer contain isopropyl alcohol, which is not the same stuff as what’s in your dad’s prized bottle of Pappy Van Winkle. They’ll both get you drunk, but the former is more likely to cause blindness, organ damage, and death.
When Dad finds his $2000 bottle of bourbon emptied you’re going to have lots worse things than blindness, organ damage, and death to look forward to.
They are not hard… you can build a reflux still out of copper and brass fittings from any plumbing store and pack it with marbles or rocks. You can even build in thermometers and stopcocks into the head to control the refluxing and keep accurate temperatures.
It has a roof, right? Do it up there. Or in the alleyway. But seriously, you could build a small one and run it on an electric plate, using your range’s vent hood for moisture evac. I’ve seen 'em. They do not have to be large. The littlest I’ve seen runs on 2 gallon batches. Granted, you don’t get much out of 'em and have to keep refilling your mash. But you can run small, is the point.
To be fair, you could probably cook meth in there and no one would notice; when the wind blows the right way, the smell from all the grows in the building comes right up the lift shafts (there are a lot more of them recently - got to do something with that extra bedroom since the Tories & Lib Dems introduced the bedroom tax)
I was doing service work in a sewage treatment plant once, when a guy comes up to me in the men’s room and says, you must be new here. I responded yeah, and then he says, around here we wash our hands before using the restroom. I was only working on some air conditioning units, but still good advise.
