Lolz I just vaped it. Keep in mind this was the ONLY way for me to distill extract at ANY kind reasonable temps. As you likely know this is the old school way of disitlling thermally sensitive compounds. In this rig the temp at the head rarely exeeds about 115C and runs easily albeit slowly at 100C. 115C is where is really starts to work fast and obviously requires higher boiling flask temps and then starts to superheat the steam just a bit.
Other than that the method runs the same as vacuum distillation. Terps fracion off first and boy howdy does my home smell like a pine cone when that happens! Remember this is not a closed system so you can smell what is happening.
The difference between steam distillation and vacuum distillaiton as I ran it was almost zero really. In other words multiple runs through the rig are needed for higher purity. If you look carefully at the rinse off portion you can spot around one of the water pocket bubbles a mistake I made. I saw dark tails start but kept running it a short time and you can spot some dark material around one of those pockets. The two other differences are steam distillation is slow comparatively and of course water purge issues need to be addressed.
This is not my first steam rig either. The first ones I guess the vids did not get archived and GOOD! They were VERY efficient and FAST producing distillation but… embarassing to say… I felt the only way to do this at the time was a single vessel and not to inject the steam but rather add water via addition funnel onto very hot oil. This meant continuous multiple explosive releases of water vapor. This means the steam would get trapped under the puddle, then superheat as steam, superheated steam becomes explosive (think Mt. St. Hellens) and the superheated contained explosions produced RAPID disitillate in the condenser. Superheated steam was used when I was a kid on the farm in Central Oregon to extract mint oil from the mint crops. That is how I knew how it worked although they don’t just dump water onto the top of hot oil. The machinery is well thought out. My try was foolhardy to do this but it worked GREAT at pulling across the fractions. This is not a new idea to me at all because I learned it as a kid in the mint fields but my implementation was unsafe.
Those mint rigs were built of heavy steel and such. Here I was running the process using superheated steam (in a way unsafe and different fashion) as if to extract sensitive mint oil but only in a glass rig! Face palm moment and after each run then the boiling flask would develop the start of tiny cracks in the bottom. The steam injector is much safer and I do not allow the superheated popping now. Even then I was seeing cracks in the boiiling vessel after several runs and now believe my error was in not having the boiling flask temp set high enough to avoid the sharp thermal spike created by the steam at point of injection.
That whole explanation and processs though is really a post on its own. In fact I might rig up again for a complete run and vid showing this because it is hands down the cheapest and most effective way to start a career distilling this stuff. No vac pump is needed and I stopped refining my process further when I could get set up with a vacuum pump that could pull well enough to distill.
On a commercial basis or if I could never afford a vacuum set up I would have modified the rig to be all metal and there are a few refinements otherwise too but once set up like a mint still (which are enormous machines pulled into the field) as a metal superheated steam injection system the throughput can be very high .
All that being said… as I mentioned I grew up on farms doing this sort of thing. Never EVER underestimate the horrific danger of superheated steam. One foot away and the day is happy. Get hit by a blast and life becomes very unhappy for a long time if you survive past a week. Like anything explosive and hot it MUST be engineered to handle it if you go the superheated route. This rig shown is NOT a superheated style.