@drjackhughes might be a good one to ask on this.
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You can likely distill the ethanol off.
Don’t use vac, go slow at atmosphere and if possible use a fractionating column and distill it to azeotrope
Weigh the ethanol and confirm it to be the same density as pure ethanol.
Maybe run it on a GC and look for weird peaks?
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I talked to them and they said at 1% it should not be an issue.
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My apologies for the late response, @Renchi ! Ask @cyclopath for my number if you don’t have it, already. I answer all safety questions free of charge, any time!
You should be able to distill the ethanol off the surfactant under vacuum in the rotovap to clean it up. You may want to add some water sequestrant like mol-sieve or calcium oxide to the boiling flask, just to be safe.
Alconox is intentionally designed for laboratories where this sort of thing happens, so you can even call them to ask! That’s one of the perks of using the high-end suds!
I hope you and yours are all well, and that this information can still be of use to you!
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Thank you very much. I’ll hit him up about your number.
I talked to Alconox and they said at 1% solution it should be fine to use the etho without having to resort to any clean up measures due the the small amount and that it was already dry. So I’m going to go by their word and decide that I’m safe as is.
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Er… maybe I misunderstood your situation. So you left clean water/alconox solution (with NO scunge from dirty dishes in it) in a 10L beaker… then you dumped it out but did not RINSE it… so it naturally dried overnight with a small amount of soap residue in it.
Then your minion filled it with cool 190 proof ethanol collected from the rotovap receiver, and poured this approximately 10L of cool ethanol back into your stock barrel, which was NOT (already?) filled with (x? gallons of) 190 proof ethanol.
Is all of that accurate?
Was the barrel empty before he poured this beaker into it?
Was more than one beakerful collected and poured into the barrel?
Did you inform Alconox that this ethanol is an extraction solvent distilled off of botanical concentrate product for human consumption?
Finally, did you mention the mode of product consumption is heated vapor inhalation?
The latter question is an essential point to make in all cases of known or possible Cannabis product contamination, because people can eat a LOT more stuff than they can inhale, safely, especially considering thermal decomposition products and heat capacity of vaporized materials!
Lest we be reminded of the vapegate crisis…
Yes, it is probably safe… but I, for one, would never stake public health and safety in consuming my products on “probably” if I can help it in any way. Just food (read: vapor/smoke) for thought… Be safe, my friend!
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It is denatured etho with heptane and the barrel already had solvent in it, which is why I got worried. Other than that you have the right impression. The beaker had been used to prepare the alconox solution and then poured into a boiling flask for cleaning. That was then not rinsed out and used to collect etho/ hep that then was combined with more etho/hep.
I did mention all of this to the person I talked to at Alconox and I was adamant about this being used for extraction with the purpose of inhaling the end product. The barrel is still marked ‘do not use’. I was assured it would be safe still. Being that I’m still worried, I’m likely going to only use that barrel for cleaning purposes instead of the extraction, just to be safe.
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That sounds like a great idea if you can spare it!
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If making distillate from the crude… I would totally just use that solvent…