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…
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
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Room temp ethanol for the win. Recover most of the ethanol with membranes and chill a 5-10% solution for winterization. That will take a fraction of the chilling capacity that you’d use chilling all of your extraction solvent. Centrifuge/UF waxes. Water Wash the crude and throw it in the wiper.
Chilling your extraction ethanol is overrated. Save that energy for a more concentrated solution and clean up with water and distillation/ adsorbents. It works for material destined for distillation or crashing THCa.
Co2 can be tuned to first extract the terps selectively and then with other perameters pull cannabinoids and waxes, all depends on temp and pressure settings
Point taken, there are definitely efficiencies to be gained by your approach, likely cost reductions in electricity.
But then again, you also spend much more labour cleaning up crude (winterization, then to water wash I imagine you have to use a secondary solvent).
I was not aware it went that low! My goal was to hit -40c and I only know I hit that because my temp gun stops reading anything lower that -40c. Helpful bit of info thank you.
This makes sense to me, along with what @cyclopath has mentioned. For now my solution is extract warmer with hydro, dissolve in ETOH to winterize, then distill.
I see how it is not the most efficient way but its the easiest change compared to what we were running last month, and I can propose changing to ETOH extraction down the line if they continue this path.
