My thought for the time being is to run through the ffe to take most of the chill off the -60c injection and let the rest of it happen in the collection vessel
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Ill look when i get there, it was just stainless counter flow off amazon. Works pretty good for the price
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I’m curious why you guys would go talk to Bizzy to buy a chiller.
The Huber chillers are terrible for what you want them for and are over priced IMO, how can you not see this clear as day? Do you just like them because Bizzy talks about and sells them?
The Unistat operating principle runs counter to what you are trying to achieve and you are paying a huge premium for it as well as the Huber brand name. Why does this sound like a good idea to you?
Bizzy is great (though a little full of himself IMO) and I don’t hate him but he sure has some people wrapped around his little finger. I love how he has crafted a narrative that the “smart” people go to him and everyone else is just dumb blue collar guys. LOL. He’s a good salesman but to be honest he hasn’t really innovated in the extraction space in years. The CO2 cooling was cute years ago but it’s not really the best idea IMO.
A Huber 915w costs $120,000+ and has 1.3Kw cooling capacity at -80C.
A Huber 950w costs about $450,000+ and has 10Kw cooling at -80C.
A Cryodax 60X has 11Kw at -80C and costs $140,650.
Pretty shocking difference, isn’t it.
The comparison I like to make is that a Huber is like a very overpriced scalpel. A lot of what you pay for is precision temp control that we don’t need in extraction. What we need is a cheap sledge hammer of a chiller and that’s something like a Cryodax (or custom made unit similar to what Bhogart is doing).
Don’t forget that most of these chillers that are powerful enough to actually replace dry ice as you current use it would require 400V+ electrical service and a separate water cooling system setup as either run-to-waste off of municipal water or a separate cooling tower. Flow rate required for a Cryodax 60X is 22gpm at 70F. That would add up quick if you did the run-to-waste route. A cooling tower is ideal (and expensive).
Which brings up another great point that is a detractor of fully enclosed chillers: rejecting the heat removed from the process and from the operation of the chiller’s pump/compressors. This has to be done one way or another. Water cooling is the best/quietest. Fan cooling is also an option. Anyone who has owned a large fan-cooled chiller will tell you they can be loud and add significant heat to the work area.
I still laugh to myself when I think about Bizzy’s post he made while testing insulation for his columns a few months ago. He had a Huber 915w being cooled with a 10t glycol chiller (I’d love to know the installed price of this) and by his own admission it took several hours to reach -70C with no thermal load on the system besides the bare insulated columns! This is due to the overly cautious temp control regime in the Unistat control system not wanting to overshoot and not cycling the compressor enough.
Does that sound like a good idea for replacing dry ice recovery?? IMO Bizzy should have long ago hired a refrigeration technician to build him custom units like Bhogart has done. It’s actually kind of shocking he hasn’t done this given he is the messiah of passive recovery.
IMO for these reasons fully enclosed chillers are not a good option to replace DI. The best option would be a cooling system setup like a home split A/C system with the condenser/fan mounted outside of the building with refrigerant lines running into the evaporator. This allows all heat/noise to be rejected without having to use water cooling system which I promise you is expensive and annoying in and of itself.
Also think about this: If you bought a huge chiller like a 950w or Cryodax 60X you’ve got to cool it somehow and using run-to-waste water at 22 gpm is going to get expensive and is just plain wasteful to do. The real solution is to place a cooling tower outside the facility and use that to cool the water that cools the chiller. But if you’re going to setup a cooling tower to reject the heat from your chiller and go through the trouble of plumbing it into the building, you might just as well setup a split chiller system with an external condenser right off the rip. I can almost guarantee that this will be significantly cheaper and more reliable.
And we haven’t even talked about the number of things that can go wrong with a chiller and knock you offline until it’s repaired. So many moving parts and they’re often crammed into the chiller case to make it an all-in-one unit.
@Concentrated_humbold Trust me I feel you on the annoyance of having to make the daily pilgrimage to get dry ice I have to do that too and it takes me about 45-60 minutes round trip. IMO setting up a chiller that will allow you to run like you currently are using dry ice is really only worth it if you can mount the condenser outside you shop and it’s ok to have that type of noise around you. Otherwise you will pay a lot for a chiller (and a cooling loop for it) that doesn’t give you anywhere close to the recovery/chilling rates you’re used to with DI and it will be a disappointment.
I’m not sure about your situation but I would rather take the chiller money and buy a truck/trailer so you can transport much more dry ice per trip. This is what I’m considering. Shit you’d probably have enough left over to afford a Corken T291. The Corkens are a dream to run by the way and mine is the best extraction investment I’ve ever made.
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Because the sale price is the same whether someone goes to bizzy or someone else for the same chiller.
Pro refrigeration is by far cheaper but been hearing rough things about their chillers too.
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Honestly to be able too see them run, ive never bought a chiller this big and really don’t know that much about them. Bizzy doesnt matter to me unless he has one that would work for what i need and i can pay on the spot. Other than that im open to the best chiller for the price period. I could mount it outside if i wanted too but as it stands im getting by just fine, more of a curiosity and if its a fit perfect if not its just another place ive been.
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yea , well said.
im constantly amazed at the impact of IG “clout” has on folks. The whole Hubers being for "# ballersonly " thing has worked surprisingly well in recent years. A huber unistat is for doing actual chemical processing where, precision temp control/sensing/regulation is a life or death situation or big $$ lost due to off spec rxn. And running them like most folks do for CLS operation is rather hard on em too.
I dont think this hype will last much longer.
I also wonder how much longer -40C and below will be the standard for top shelf concentrate mfg. The difference in CAPEX and OPEX b/t -20C and <-40C is significant. Ive noticed very little difference if any on product qualities between the two extremes on dry bio runs at least.
Interested to hear opinions on <-40C for live resin vs dry bio.
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Nothing crazy but they work and are easy to mount to a wall if need be. For $150 a piece i think i got no complaints. Might not pass an inspection though
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You running co2 to chill the coil jacket?
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No they were hooked to a chiller that took a shit, so back to dry ice and the reason for the chiller talk. @The_Lone_Stiller im just running straight wort coils now, the chiller broke and have been contemplating on which way to go.
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Right on man, I agree with your statement.
This is just an opinion but it seemed to me that Bizzy was more interested in rubbing elbows with the Huber CEO and possibly getting commissions from chiller sales than finding the right tool for the job. I think it’s borderline predatory but that’s just me. I try to let people know as much as possible. If people knew about refrigeration or bothered to look into chillers before shelling out the $$ it’s pretty easy to tell the Unistats are all wrong for us in BHO.
I think -40C is cold enough for live resin injection. There’s no further benefit to going any colder IME.
For recovery it depends on the setup and what kind of delta T you need to maintain across the heat exchanger.
The demand on the recovery exchanger is highly variable depending on the conditions in the tanks/collection pots and the overall operating state of the system plus the ambient conditions.
Chillers are mostly slow to react so you need to size and run them for the most difficult conditions they will face even if that’s only for a brief period.
With dry ice and a submerged coil you can easily add more or less cooling power on demand. You can also maintain decent vapor pressure in your solvent tank and not mess with any N2 if you are running active recovery.
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@Concentrated_humbold IMO any fully enclosed chiller with both the evaporator and condenser inside it, whether it’s air or water cooled, is a terrible choice for this application (medium to large scale butane/propane recovery) and that advice is the same whether it’s an active or a passive setup.
The heat you are removing from the recovery process has to go somewhere. It can’t be created or destroyed. It must all be transferred or transformed.
It just doesn’t make sense to have a fan or air cooled chiller in the work area for a large application like this because that just transfers the heat from the process (and the chiller itself) out into the lab space. If you have a huge open work area this might be ok but generally you would just end up having to increase the rooms HVAC (basically another chiller) to finally expel the heat outside.
See how it’s silly to do that? You have one enclosed chiller system (evap and condenser) that transfers the heat from the process to the air and another split chiller system, the HVAC, to transfer it outside.
You might as well just use a split system in the first place and that’s the final answer if you want to go this route.
Water chilling the enclosed “lab” chiller instead of air cooling is a step in the right direction and that’s why it’s usually mandatory on big boy setups. That’s why Bizzy had a 915w with it’s own 10 ton glycol chiller.
Doesn’t it just hit your gut instinct the wrong way to need a chiller for your chiller? Don’t you feel like there’s too many steps in that process?
The last step to simplification when using a vapor-compression refrigeration system to cool the recovery process is to remove the chiller’s thermal transfer fluid (and pump) from the equation and just chill the process directly with the refrigerant then send the refrigerant to a fan cooled condenser that’s outside the shop. I believe this is what Icetech has. I don’t like that company but they seem to be the only ones who understands this idea and market it to cannabis.
Anyways as you are currently finding out having chiller problems is very shitty and inevitable. Dry ice is very reliable and has a very potent cooling capacity (latent heat of sublimation) that is hard to replicate with a chiller. Also if you run active recovery being able to quickly vary the delta T across the heat exchanger by adding more/less DI to a submerged coil has some big advantages IMO like maintaining proper tank pressure and not needing to vapor assist the tank ever. Can’t do that with a slow chiller. Or a passive setup.
I think you should take the chiller money and get a covered trailer and get yourself a few thousand pounds of ice at a time if you can. Stick with simple wort coils and make the DI trip every 10-14 days instead of every single day.
I don’t stress about the constant “consumable” aspect of DI. I look at it like a baker looks at sugar. It’s just factored into the price of goods produced. Same way the maintenance/electrical cost of a chiller would be.
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This is where I found my fix
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Don’t know what temps you need to hit, but for a hellacious amount of cooling power at -50C I’d be looking at Fluid Chillers AIR ULT series, thats what we use to cool down our bulk ethanol.
In case anyone reading this hasn’t already seen it I’m the guy behind the Who sells huge cryo chillers that aren't huge disappointments? thread…I’m intimately familiar with what the Unistat line costs and how well they perform.
If you aren’t dissuaded by that thread or what @Tech1145 wrote and still want a Unistat, I have one Unistat 815 left that has a new ControlOne a couple months ago. Asking $29k OBO, currently located in northern Colorado but can crate/palletize and ship LTL for reasonable.
I dont need to hit crazy low temps im just lazy (ish) and don’t wanna have to get dry ice all the time but i agree 100% its just one of the costs of doing business.
Honestly like mentioned above I would go with a split refrigerant (“ice tech”) setup it’s relatively cheap around 10k or so installed. I ran a 5hp and never used dry ice once. Did it get crazy cold no but it kept up the entire run, close to 2# a minute on a MVP150 at times.
It did struggle a bit when it was 100 degrees outside, though I don’t you’ll have that problem up north.
Oh not to mention…only drew 22 amps of current @ 240v!
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Makes me think of the “portable a/c”, how many home growers use them vs an actual split a/c.
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Guess u never heard of a package unit. 
.
Hahaha yeah we stupidly had one in the room and thought a second one would do the job, nope, kepts the same temperature and just doubled our electricity cost. Upgrading to a split system now 
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My dude, you may soon be surprised at how important precision temperature/energy control is for folks in this industry-
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