Hi there I am trying to decide which solvent I wish to use for crude production, we are trying to process a humble 150 pounds a day into crude and can’t decide which method would be best. My heart is saying go bho because that’s what are solely do now and another machine would not be a big deal at all. But I wanted to open up this idea to the forum!
No question about it butane the way to go @Intergalactic
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Honestly, it’s cheaper to recover, easier to purge and a process we’re all to familiar with. We’re just starting to get into distillation, is bho crude easier to work with?
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Way easy. I’d just stick to butane it’s easy to scale and low cost of operations however depends on what your doing for your distillation sop ie water wash , pest remediation
Hexane is actually more scalable because recovery is done separately and scaled separately than extraction while the typical BHO extractor needs to finish recovering the previous run before you can start the next one. Hexane also doesn’t require bolting high pressure clamps constantly.
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hexane Will take less time extracting more time post procesing but if you gorgelt about the buchner and get pressure filters
Bag,candel, or cartridge hex is a very Nice solvent and faster and more scalable
@Kingofthekush420 is confident that cold hexane even works way better don t know if that is cryo cold or cold
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I havent gotten a chance to run it myself, but my consultee who I turned onto hexane has done it and sent me the above pic. He also said he didnt didnt really pull anything when winterizing, he extracted at like -80 though.
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A company I worked for used to be well known for hexane dabs and live resin. Apparently most customers thought it was better than the bho versions
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Again I would follow the format. Buy a pilot bho system do your lbs make your money back and get a wiped film.
Ive been running hexane for the last two years and im very happy with it. was incredibly easy to scale to 60 pounds an hour, however certain precautions need to be taken when pumping hexane or running it in a centrifuge due to it being a non conductive fluid with a low vapor pressure. Always want to back fill your centrifuge with an inert gas and ground every line that you pump through.I would even double ground everything. Watch your flow rates while pumping as static discharge is a real problem at high flow rates. we run at room temp so winterization would need to be scaled as well. I would suggest Methanol as thats what i have had the best luck with. Ethanol seems to bind with the Crude making filtration a nightmare and acetone seems to have some form of reaction during the solvent recovery process that equates to low potency crude from what ive seen.
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what modes of ethanol filtration have you experimented with?
For 150 a day, stick with butane. If you ever need to get into the thousands of pounds a day, heptane scales way more easily and safely.
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buchner and bag filtration. Bag filtration seems to work faster but not as good at pulling dry. I run a #2 bag filter with 37 micron nylon monofiliment filters then into 2 20x2.5 inch 1 micron filters. Ethanol would take me 8 hours to filter 60 gallons with an average loss of 40% by mass. Methanol takes me 3 hours to filter same said amount with an average loss of 20% by mass and a larger increase in potency percentage.
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why Heptane vs Hexane?
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Higher boiling point, less cancerous and toxic for operators, still very volatile and easy to recover.
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Did you try positive pressure filtration with regulated inert gas? You might be able to cut that time down.
I did positive pressure filtration via diaphragm pump. pushes fats past the filters.
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Actually I haven’t tried it with Methanol and the 37 micron monophiliment filters. I may try that and see what happens. I need to pick up a 200 gallon jacketed tank to change over to an inert gas push.
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Makes sense. The toxicity has always been a worry of mine considering its a Nero toxin. that’s why I’m a stickler for PPE.
Looks like Heptane is easier to boil off according to the laten heat of evaporation. doing a little math it looks like it would increase solvent recovery by 10% just switching to Heptane. Thank you for pointing this out to me!
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but is that worth double the cost for the solvent?