presumably you had to pump it in there.
do you know what the pressure is now?
do you have anyway of figuring it out?
depending on how much liquid you’ve got in there, your description suggests it could be easily be above 50psi. just “burping it in the morning” isn’t gonna cut it [works great with jacketed tanks, on chillers over night, way easier with a vapor port. but the OP isn’t there]
At rm temp, your butane should be at about 17psi* in the headspace. however, if the headspace is only 20% of your tank, then you’ve compressed your guestimated 15gal a couple or six times.
how are you pumping (which pump) into your tank? do you have a condenser in-line, or is your tank getting hot?
A trash can of full ice water will solve that. some go much colder.
CMEP-OL. We pump in above 100psi, as it gets hotter it pumps over 200.
I bought an in-line condenser from a BHO extraction company recently, but the ball valves leaked. It was apparently pressure tested… I also had issues with butane (lq) hanging out in the condenser, even with the condenser mounted above. So I said to hell with it for now.
Not sure what the pressure was when this happened though, the tank was cooled down, my guess is somewhere between 60 and 80, as that was the highest psi on my material tube gauge last blast.
Wouldn’t you want to keep it warm, vent off appropriately and have the vapors push the atmosphere out. If you are going to be chilling your tank all the way down, with dry ice. Go a couple more steps. Pour in some alcohol to get better surface area and helping you get colder. Once you get that cold, if you have a vac guage of sorts, vac out the atmosphere. The problem here, with getting it that cold, you will freeze any moisture from he atmosphere you let in. I would get it room temp and vent off until she doesn’t have much “uuummmpphhhh” left and tighten her back up and pretend it didn’t happen. You’ll lose a few lbs, but whatevs. Trapping moisture in your solvent is worse. I’ve done it.
Dry ice and ethanol will lower the temp of the tank way more than necessary to get the “air” out. It would be helpful during recovery, but is unnecessary and possibly even counter productive for purging the atmosphere.
Ideal would be about -20C. which is about 20C below the boiling point of butane. So ALL his solvent will be a liquid. the “air” on the other hand will all still be a gas. at that temp, is is safe to vent ALL the pressure in then tank. except of course the OP only has a dip tube, so if they just “burp the tank” like @Concentrated_humbold suggests, all the liquid (their butane) will come out first. @spitzenkorperhas to turn their tank upside down to vent gas from that tank.
As far as trapping moisture: molsieves!
Then there is the pump. The CMEP-OL’s used to come with a forced air heat exchanger plumbed after the pump, it did a great job of pulling off most of the heat put into the solvent by the pump. I’ve been told that so many folks were deleting that heat exchanger and adding a larger liquid cooled one, that the manufacturer deleted it to save money. Problem is, that means folks like @spitzenkorper’s boss think they are designed to run without a heat exchanger…they’re not.
How do I know?
See 1k word substitute above!!
Because I’ve run both versions, and had to implement heat exchangers on two of the newer flavor in the last month. Otherwise the tank heats up, and you get increasingly high back pressures. Took me by surprise on the first one, because I’ve run three of the old style…
It doesn’t take much water to remove that heat. even the mt-69 in a 5gal bucket with some ice water will greatly speed OP’s recovery. using a heat exchanger designed to self drain once the pump has been turned off is ideal, but those are usually enclosed and cooled by a circulating chiller.
Both machines I was adding CMEP-OL’s to had those heat exchangers built in already…does that tell you how important they are?!?
Edit: venting the tank till it self chills and stops is another option. it’s faster, but distinctly less safe.
the tank mentioned below had a dip tube, and no condensed liquid. Making it a slightly different critter than the OP’s
That’s kinda why I said it wasn’t probably the best idea to get it that cold, after the thought. But, the main problem is, he’s already introduced atmosphere to his solvent tank. He has most likely pulled in moisture and now that solvent is contaminated, quite possibly. He’ll know when he does his next runs. I would personally, evacuate your tank “safely” (hard finger quotes), sweep with nitro, pull vac and start over. You gotta let your boss give you a day for distilling solvent. Your extracts will thank you. At least two washes. At least give you that. @spitzenkorper. I spend an entire day on distilling.
Did you hear that…? It was Rudolf Diesel rolling over and over and over in his grave lol! Probably something about butane…
Edit:
Now I need a hemp oil burning vehicle!
I’ve gone electric, and I’m just about done with my fleet of wvo mercedes.
the one that still drives has 350k on it. paid $1000 for almost 100 thousand miles ago. first one to die had 300k on it when it came in the door with a broken odometer. math says we probably put at least another 200k on it over ten years. cost me $100.
given that I treat them like some folks here treat their recovery pumps, you might want to find a vehicle and invite me over to help convert it.
edit: how is this relevant? Because you can take something as “flammable” as vegetable oil, mix it with air, and compress it, and it will go bang! proof? 300,000+ miles doing just that!
I really hate the fact that I let VW buy back my diesel cars. They really were the best cars I’ve ever owned.
I made a lot of money on the buybacks but now I miss my cars that would get 700 miles to the tank. Not rich enough to afford a Tesla yet but I’m hoping VW cheaper electric vechicles make it cheaper to own one of these cars.
shoot, id love to do an ev conversion once I have some time! You ever see those zero motercycles? https://www.zeromotorcycles.com
Probably overpriced, nevertheless cool!
So maybe you’re wondering what I ended up doing, or maybe not. Either way, I ended up following @Concentrated_humbold 's simple approach. Turned the tank upside down, left for the night, came back in the morning and bled the tank until the gas escaping was a gentle stream and thick miscing lines were present. lost some butane, but as you all know, butane evaporating is a highly endothermic process, and the tank cooled itself, essentially keeping most of the butane liquid. As for moisture, I think I’ll just distill my solvent today with some fresh desiccant beads. Thanks for the help future4200 community. In the near future, probably going to get a ‘y valve’ for my tanks, as suggested by @Killa12345, unless a recovery tank has other differences besides that valve… if such is the case please inform me and i’ll just get the whole recovery tank setup.
first hit.