Buchner Funnel Issues

Hello everyone, I have been involved in extraction for almost 2 years now and have received a godly amount of help from this community so with that said, thank you!
I started my closed loop back up (modified MK4c, passive) about a week ago after a month of down time due to moving locations. Yesterday i started the winterization process and today began my first cryo filter (2nd filter after room temp).
While i was getting to the bottom of my holding pot i noticed a surprising amount of debri floating on the bottom. I figured i just had a leak and some silica got through from the first filter since i did use a small amount, so once i got the last bit through my buchner i noticed quite a bit of small flakes all over the top of my silica cake. It looked like many small bits of thin filmed plastic. I took some off and squished it in my fingers and it just turned to dust like a small moth or something, then i heated some up and it melted. I didnt know what the hell it was until i looked inside my buchner funnel and realized that the surface of the porcelain was flaking off from the inside…
Has anyone ever experienced something like this? I use Ethanol for all of my winterization procedures but when i think back i remember i did use acetone for an experiment once with my buchner. My guess is that is what did it, but i would really appreciate some feedback from the community just to make sure im not missing something else. Thanks =]

is the buchner made of porcelain? or plastic?

I had a similar thing happen recently

Stainless everything is a great way to avoid anything like this and allow you to use essentially any solvent. And your saying these flakes are making it through your filter? What micron? I wonder if the powders are somehow dissolving making it through and then re precipitating out? No idea how they’d make it through your filter otherwise. Even a basic like 25 micron filter should catch that. But just pull everything wash it all off and re run it for a final polish through a 1-3 micron paper and should catch any debree. If it’s still making it through you can use some Celite or media to create a sub micron filter on top of your paper if you don’t have access to sub micron papers. Aka 0.5 micron etc

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we’ve got a disconnect here…

if it melts, and the buchner is not plastic, it’s not buchner.

or as @mj_martini said.

if the buchner is plastic, and you ran Acetone through it, we could certainly be looking at buchner bits.

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take a sample of the “flakes” and send them for analysis for cannabinoids.
Did you say this is a THC or CBD extraction?

At our lab, we see highly concentrated CBD solutions crystallize out both in the funnel/media and in the receiving flask.

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(being a new member i was limited to 1 reply so i had to wait to reply, sorry for the delay)
It is definitely Porcelain Buchner.
After further inspection i think @Siosis is right about material getting through. I think it was from a previous THC-A experiment. Some material must had been stuck to the inside of the Buchner and slowly started flaking off when i started my first run back up.
When i first looked into the bottom of the Buchner with a flashlight it looked like the actual porcelain was flaking out(which i thought was crazy) but after sticking a rod into it and scraping along i realized it was definitely not the porcelain.
I was confused and thought the worst lol thanks for everyones input, back to work :crazy_face:

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I have my occasional moments of being right :upside_down_face:

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