BizzyBee or ETS?

I would LOVE to give you a Demo/Design Consultation at our showroom in Tacoma WA, if you are ever interested, or in the market for a new system! Hit me up directly on my text-machine: 206-960-1665.

Thanks! :dragon:

Thank you for your compliment! Running a BZB is not difficult. I can train you personally, or Calvin and Kyle are always available too. We do our own on-site training in the field for a fee, and you can also send your new employees to our showroom in Tacoma WA for day of training FREE, in our 10x20 CID1 booth.

Text me directly if you have any questions! 206-960-1665. :dragon:

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Thanks! I love the hash-snobs comment! :dragon:

QCs wear out slower if you keep them clean and lubed. BZB users can hit us up for the SOP. It’s just the little O-ring inside them that gets torn from friction, and can be easily replaced.

QCs are very convenient and arguably worth the hassle. They can always be removed if you’re willing to deal with the hassle of hard-lining instead. You trade one hassle for another…

Regarding CO2-cooling: I always tell people it’s a CapEx versus OpEx situation. CO2 costs nothing up-front, but requires a consumable expense (like dry ice does). Chillers that can replace CO2 cost a small fortune. One can always start with CO2 to save capital, and then buy chillers later out of profits.

CO2 is a very effective hack, cheaper and more controllable than dry ice. The cost of a chiller is about one year’s average CO2 usage. CO2 is VERY effective though: it gets COLD (-60c), and has the POWER to condense vapor at several pounds per minute for Passive Recovery. As a COG it represents about 0.5-1% of the value of the extract.

Don’t be fooled by the Haters! Holler at me directly if you have any questions! 206-960-1665.

Peace and love! :heartpulse:

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Edit: This is funny and completely wrong. CO2 is not more efficient, it is a consumable. Besides that, I can get colder than dry ice with just propane, costs less than dry ice, and faster than dry ice. Not to mention, propane has more enthalpy than CO2 - which means propane has more cooling power per kg. :person_facepalming: :person_shrugging:

Bud, I have been cycling solvent since 2012. It was a more recent addition to the system that made it patent-able and so we did (Patent Granted). I have never used the inefficient two-tank system like everyone else and always stood out from the crowd. Our base tech allows us to inject at sub-zero temps non-stop all day long without a chiller, co2, or dry ice and we never have to worry about MAQ limits.

Now with our latest tech, we do not need the excess waste heat of a water heater and our system nearly runs completely on itself. Our patent pending heat and refrigeration tech alleviates a ton of wasted energy as we can get down to -80c with ease and provide +50c heat on demand - at the same time. Typically takes about 5 minutes to do a 100c swing hot to cold or cold to hot.

Chillers running chillers to chill a refrigerant (butane/isobutane/propane) or dumping CO2 all day are obsolete concepts. We never followed suit with the industry as we saw inefficiencies and we fixed them.

For more information give us a call: 970-893-2763 or check our website at www.illuminatedextractors.com

Cheers! :beers:

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How is this misinformation? If you mean your entire reply is misinformation than yes i agree your post is a lot of misinformation. You should do some research on your competition before making false claims and spreading them online.

Its extremely clear you haven’t been paying any attention to your competition, to swap a bag in a luna it takes less than 2 minutes and requires no tools. So yes they have addressed this issue. Good to know that you agree BZB does require a ton of labor to load and unload bags, its a major downfall to traditional close loops with triclamp spools for material columns. there is a lot of room for error when you are taking apart the top and bottom of a material column multiple times a day, and a lot of consumable wear and tear every time you unbolt and reattach your clamps, which also opens up a lot of chances for leaks as you arent pressure testing your columns everytime you reassemble with new material.

Again Boris, you aren’t paying attention, there are 16 automated valves not three, it does a LOT more than just push solvent in and drain solvent out. There is also no automated valve to ā€œrelease the oil when recovery is done.ā€ There are two manual valves on the system, one to pour and one to release vacuum on the material column when its time to swap bags.

Luna doesnt provide one recipe, there are tons of variables the operator can adjust to change how the system runs and when you decide what you like you can save those parameters and then its repeatable time and time again, that cannot be dont manually with multiple operators.

Funny because a MJbiz i asked if BZB was planning to automate and the answer was not yet but its a goal to have it by next mjbiz. So do you have any systems in the field with automation right now and if its expensive how much more expensive is it because your comparable system to a luna is about 70k less and doesnt provide automation??

What happens when your highly trained operators call in sick? or you add a second shift? or a third shift? what happens when that operator decides he wants to leave? How quickly can your business running a manual system get back to running the same quality your highly trained operator was running? how much does that highly trained operator demand as a salary?

We start a run and walk away for 1-1.5 hours depending on the recipe were running and during that time we dont have to think about the extractor or be in the c1d1 room at all.

I dont disagree that a manual system can produce a better product if you are baby sitting it all day but i do have a good sense of smart business practices that clearly show automation is the answer for higher volume and lower COGS. The bzb works and can make a wonderful product with the right operator but the pros and cons of a luna vs a BZB didnt push me to choose a bzb, it lead me to a luna and we are absolutely crushing it in a very challenging market.

If you arent looking to automate as many processes in your lab as possible you will be left behind by people that have.

#automateeverything

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Luna-style automation is a marketing trick to appeal to Chads, who prefer to invest in Capital instead of Labor. Protect your jobs and your fellow extraction professionals by shunning this gimmick. And to any Chads that are conned by this trickery: we at BZB Enterprises International can provide this level of automation as well. And it’s backwards compatible and available on any of our diverse configurations as well, rather than just one brittle setup. But it’s expensive!

@thesk8nmidget answered most of this post already but I want to add a little too.

Our automation is not a marketing gimmick, period. Our customers can and do attest to that. But I don’t want to argue this point here because for those who don’t see the value in automation, that’s okay. Some people will always prefer to be literally hands-on. We believe in giving people the tools they need to make the best possible extracts with consistency and scalability. We also know that our extractors aren’t for everyone. I think it’s awesome that there’s a core group of people who like watching sight glasses and throttling flows by hand, etc. There’s also a group of more analytical tinkerers/artisans/extractors or whatever you want to call them who like to play with things through a modern digital interface with realtime displays of vessel temps and pressure, chiller temps, 16 valves statuses, pump statuses, etc. They analyze detailed datalogs with over 50 parameters and millions of datapoints. Then, at the end of the day, they walk away and have whatever recipe they created for a strain/product or whatever, repeat itself without them running it.

Both methods are valid. Both methods get to the same product at the end of the day. The creativity involved is the same either way, it’s just applied differently. It comes down to preference, scale, and bottom line profit.

The biggest variable in BHO extraction is the biomass itself. Without the ability to see what’s going on inside the CLS and control it, all the skills of the operator are neutralized. What Luna offers is a single recipe for a complex process where intuition, experience, and control is most valuable.

Like has been said before, we don’t offer ā€œa single recipe.ā€ Operators can create and store as many recipes as they want and have a number of parameters they can play with. And to imply that computer control of a process inherently simplifies it, is not accurate. After seeing all the misinformation that’s out there about automation in this industry and how our products ā€œjust opens a valve for awhileā€ I think maybe I can add some info that will help dispel this myth. Our programming is broken up into subroutines. Each subroutine controls a ā€œsubprocessā€ which kinda but not perfectly corresponds with one of the unit operations in the extraction process. Our simplest subroutine by far is filling the material column (we call it the reactor) with solvent from the solvent tanks. It would be more fun to share a different, more complex subroutine but they get into more proprietary control that I don’t really want floating around. So here’s what the fill subroutine does over the course of about 4mins:

  • Confirm vacuum check has completed successfully either by maintaining pressure or operator override on the popup window if it failed. (Automated safety check that some operator permissions levels cannot override because safety is important to us).
  • Compare solvent tank 1 (ST1) and solvent tank 2 (ST2) to the target soak temperature.
    • If either solvent tank is below the set temp, proceed to #3
    • If both solvent tanks are above the set temp, warn the operator with a popup and a yellow warning light (you can daisy chain as many stack lights as you want and put them all over your lab). Operator can click a button to either:
      • Ignore the soak temp and start filling [proceed to #3 or
      • Wait for the solvent tanks to get down to the soak temp [hold until set temp is achieved in either of the solvent tanks then proceed to #3]
      • If operator doesn’t click a button and one of the solvent tanks achieves the target temp, proceed to #3
  • If ST2 is not full and the pressure in ST1 is greater than that of ST2, then start filling from ST1
  • If ST2 is full, or the pressure in ST2 is greater than that of ST1, then start filling from ST2
  • If the pressure differential between the material column and the Solvent Tank is lower than the set point [user defined] then turn on the pump.
  • If the pressure differential between the material column and the Solvent Tank is higher than the set point deadband then turn off the pump.
  • If the pressure in the material column is lower than the solvent tank pressure by XXpsi then open the fill valve.
  • If the pressure in the material column is higher than the Solvent Tank it’s filling from at any point during filling, then close the fill valve to prevent backflow.
  • Control reactor temperature PID loop and ethernet communication to 12kW
  • If any of the following is true, switch to filling from the opposite Solvent Tank:
    • Fill tank is empty and idle tank is not empty
    • Fill tank level is 50% lower than idle tank level
    • Fill tank level is 25% lower than idle tank level and fill tank level is below 50%
    • If a clog is detected in the piping between the fill tank and the reactor
  • If ST1 and ST2 both read as empty, continue trying to fill from each for XX seconds, then alert operator with popup and yellow light with options to:
    • End the filling process and move on [if operator thinks the Material Column is full (sight glasses).
    • Start the automated external fill process to fill the solvent tanks from an external source. If selected, Solvent Tanks will automatically fill with enough solvent to finish filling the material column then proceed to #9.
  • If either of the two redundant upper level sensors is triggered for at least XX seconds, then stop filling and move on to the next subroutine.
  • If the fill timer reaches the limit time, stop the fill and alert the operator that the fill was stopped due to time. [The popup says something different but it’s essentially an indication that something has gone wrong during filling because it took too long]

This is the simplest of the subroutines…

Protect your jobs and your fellow extraction professionals by shunning this gimmick.

I take your point seriously about investing in capital rather than labor. I know that our company is contributing to ā€œjobs being lostā€ in some ways. I think about it often and where I usually land is this:

  1. In our customers’ labs, we have replaced manually operated equipment from pretty much every manufacturer in the industry. Every time that happens, the number of people running extraction decreases. Period. To your point @bizzybee999, some manual BHO equipment takes more labor input than others so the amount of labor decreased varies. I’ve seen a lot of BEESTs out there and they come close to maximizing the productivity of a skilled operator. But, unfortunately, it’s not the same as automation so job roles are eliminated when we come in.

  2. On the flip side, after working with more than 100 customers over the past seven years, I can say that the company itself is a huge factor in what happens to the people. In general, our customers take it one of two directions: (1) let go of most of their extraction team, continue to run the same operation they were before but with reduced labor cost and therefore increased profit margin or (2) move most of their extraction team to different job roles (pre-processing or post processing usually) and increase their output. When this happens they both increase their top line revenue and bottom line because they’re producing more with less. Of course, sometimes it’s a mix of the two depending on the needs of the business. With the market the way it is currently, we’re seeing more of #1. Margins are being squeezed across the board and many of our new customers are forced to reduce costs to survive.

  3. At a really high level, I believe in some sort of social capitalism where a mostly-free market exists with strong safety nets to help and protect people where the market fails. I think that increases in productivity, safety, and efficiency are good. Protecting jobs at all costs is bad. If we can get people away from BHO extraction equipment (i.e. out of the C1D1 area) and have them work on other stuff, that is a net positive, even if some of those people end up at a different job or a different company.

  4. Nearly all of the extractors we’ve worked with end up being happier with their job than they were before they had our equipment. We often (maybe 1 in 5) receive an order from a customer who is divided: they have a capital equity partner and a knowledge/experience equity partner who disagree on extraction equipment. When we schedule our kickoff meeting with the customer and their contractors, we hear something like ā€œthe capital partner forced this equipment on me. I didn’t want automation and I told them we will never be able to make XYZ products with it.ā€ Within a month of commissioning, they are happy. So I take comfort in the fact that we make the work lives of many of our customers better than they were before. Feel free to take this with a grain of salt. Obviously, it’s coming from me. But it’s also what I’ve seen after a number of years.

Reach out to us on IG or DM here if you have questions or want to hear more.

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