We are looking into getting an ethanol extraction setup in the future, but for now we have access to CO2 and butane machines so that’s what we’re rolling with.
…and then you’re going to use ethanol.
so you’ll end up with some of the gear you need for extracting with ethanol.
if you choose your path wisely, you can leverage that gear when you scale up.
you can extract with ethanol in your hydrocarbon rig. including solvent recovery.
depending on your CO2 rig, you might want to look into CXE.
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So you would pump in cold ethanol into the cls stripping the material and then how would you recover the ethanol?
same way you recover your hydrocarbons.
heat the receiver & cool the recovery tank.
I’ve done passive & active.
only thing that changes is the temps required.
adding another condenser helps.
Into a regular recovery tank?
I was using a 2015 PX1.
Which has a jacketed solvent tank and sight glasses. Filled that with ethanol, got it to -30C, used N2 to push it through.
Recovered into same vessel.
Done deliberately to bamboozle the boss in my case. I was told to “make shatter”.
We were not licensed for hydrocarbons, so I didn’t use them. Boss couldn’t tell the difference while extracting, and EHO makes a lovely shatter, so he couldn’t tell when I was done either.
The shotgun style heat exchanger I added to make it run faster helped with passive hydrocarbon recovery too…
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Were the pressures the same in recovery of the etoh vs the hydrocarbon gas? I am interested in repurposing a rig I have for etoh instead of running isobutane
I either used vacuum assist or a recovery pump to keep temps manageable.
I’d probably leave the recovery tank open to atmosphere if I wasn’t using a pump to reduce the boiling point.
So I’m coming from a somewhat similar situation. Had been using Co2 to make distillate (same process without the carbon filter in our case).
Now I’m being asked to make distillate from BHO crude oil. I’ve made some batches and everything has been jolly. NOTE I am not winterizing. I am running AA and T5 in my CRC stack, purging in a vac oven, decarbing on a hot plate, then running into distillate.
Recently I’ve had 2 batches of BHO starting distillate fog up on me! My fist suspicion is that its fats crashing out. (pics attached).
Do we think that is fats?
Is the solution dissolving in ETOH and winterizing?
Is @cyclopath right that we should just dissolve in ETOH in the first place?
How did this end up for @Leota21 in the end?
You can run ETOH through a BHO setup?!
Every time I come here for an answer I leave with more questions.
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What are your extraction temperatures like? And what is the contact time between the bud and the liquid butane?
Also, what are you using to distill? short path? wiped film?
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yes.
if you are making distillate from BHO, and it’s good enough that you don’t need to winterize, you’ve left too much behind in the biomass.
if your goal is to make distillate, then using ethanol as your primary extraction solvent makes more sense than using CO2 (imo), and in most cases it also makes better sense than using butane/propane.
if what you’ve got is a source of crude, then winterize. if you’re also making the crude, sitting down and looking at the cost/logistics of making that crude with ethanol is likely worthwhile.
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Fats and waxes for sure
Winterizing between first and second pass is the smallest volume to winterize
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So if fats and waxes are ending up in your distillate fraction, it means they’re actually being vaporized at cannabinoid distillation temperatures? IIRC, most of the waxes are C38 waxes or even higher alkanes, which boil at >500C (at atmospheric pressure).
Huh. Interesting. I figured they would stay in the residue (the stuff that doesn’t vaporize) fraction.
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I have chillers all over at -20C and a cooling coil that my butane goes over just before touching biomass that is Dry Ice in Iso which should be at -40C.
For distilling I use a Prescott Wipe film.
ALSO @cyclopath @Roguelab I left out a huge piece of info. The two disty batches in the image looked exactly the same yesterday, both cloudy and weird. I heated the one on the left up to about 60C and the cloudiness vanished.
Does the added info change anyone’s mind?
Dry ice and EtOH or ISO should hit -70 C (theoretically -78)
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Do you have the ability to extract colder? You can almost completely mitigate your wax extraction at low temps (as people mentioned before, at the sacrifice of efficiency)
The melting point of many waxes and fats in extracts have low melting points
Compounds like oleamide palmiatic acid etc cloudiness can have disappeared deu to sufficient heating so they melted
Very likely it will be back in a few days
If not lucky you 
why would you extract colder (sacrifice yield) when going to distillate?
to avoid winterization?
do you have data suggesting that’s the more efficient route?
I don’t have solid data either way, as we’ve not bothered with distillate in the last couple of years…but extracting warm, using heavy CRC, then winterizing before distillation, or as @Roguelab suggests between passes, seems like the route with the higher yields.
I don’t disagree that extracting colder will make winterization less of a necessity, but I’m not clear it will remove the need entirely, and I’m not convinced that the hit to yield is worth it.
winterizing NOW should solve @ChiefK19’s current issue, and imo is the better solution moving forward as well.
I agree “best” may depend on available resources.
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Don’t get me wrong, the most efficient way to distillate is through cold ethanol extraction. Winterization in my opinion decreases the efficiency of your operation (as well as increases labour costs and processing times) to the point that it’s just not worth it for us.
Decarboxylated high quality BHO extract (that has not been distilled) is nearly a 1:1 substitute for distillate, we’ve found. No winterization and no distillation necessary. Yes, you take a hit on the efficiency of the extraction, but downstream processing is so minimal that if you have excess cannabis, it’s totally worth the loss.
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Sounds like we agree on most of those points.
I’ve certainly witnessed some pretty inefficient winterization operations.
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