Can anyone quantify the Need for pH is making water clear?

Hash and Stuff Pre/Post-Processing
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Hey all,

Been working on Making water clear D8 and I just can’t seem to distill it and get water clear…it always has a light purple or light pink hue to it.

Here’s what I do:
1 x Baking Soda Wash (15min stir, 25g Baking Soda to 8L Water)
1 x Saline Wash (20lbs Salt to 20 Gallons Water)
1 x Distilled Water Wash

I have pH Strips, pH indicator liquid and a $300 pH meter and my distilled water tests ot at 5.4ph every single time.

Anybody know how to quantify or test for the correct pH needed to ensure when you distill it comes out water clear?

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How much solvent
How much brine
How much oil?

How are you water washing? Reactor? Sep funnel?

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Discharge pump with a argon line backfilling as you fill liters. Heat is the enemy of water clear.

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2L Solvent to 1L Oil
Equal parts Organic Layer to Aqueous so I wash 3: Organic layer with 3L Aqueous

I’m using a sep funnel with an overhead stirrer

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Can you explain? I thought argon was to keep oxygen out?

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Purple color indicates an alkaline ph.

Add some acid to neutralize the baking soda then brine wash it again.

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The oxygen leads to the biggest shifts in my water clear. Will distill clear but then changes color quickly when exposed to heat and oxygen. If you are not distilling water clear into the flask then there is a ph issue.

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Thanks for the reply Franklin. If I do that, how will I know I neutralized everything properly? Maybe it’s not possible but I’m trying to figure out how to test before I roto the solvent out that I did everything properly.

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Distilled water doesn’t read as pH 7 on a meter

Generally distilled water will often be under 6 as well on strips due to carbonic acid contamination

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10

I’ve noticed it’s slightly acidic. Tweele, is the goal to get the ph of the distilled water going in to be the same as when it’s going out? If it reads 5.4 going in, then is washed and then reads 5.4 then I’m good to go?

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11

Yeah that’s probably good

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Your coloring might be due to a combination of solvents and catalyst

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That makes a ton of sense. If it goes in 5.4 and comes out 6.5 then the organic layer was somewhat alkaline.

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14

How much brine is used for each wash?

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I mix it at a ratio of 20 pounds of salt to 20 Gallons of water

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What size system are you running? When I was messing around with this stuff back in the day I got water clear every time essentially on a 5l and 2l spd but once I moved up to a 20l I got more color. Pic for reference.

Snapchat-51182432~2
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6.7 ish…

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No how much brine do you use

Like do you use a full 20gal of brine to rinse 1L of oil? How much brine is consumed total in your process?
how many extractions do you perform? And by extraction i mean washes.

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My bad Rowan, for 1L of Oil, I do one 3L brine wash

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You need a lot more rinses to pull everything

Read through this article on Libre Text, it should help quite a bit.

The gist of it is that each time you “rinse” your oil, you can only ever pull a % of the target compounds (pigments)

So if there are 3.5 grams of soluble pigments in that oil, each wash will only pull
50% of that amount

The first wash will pull 1750mg

The second will pull 50% of the 1750, so 875 remains

The third wash will pull 437.5

And so on and so forth

So you definitely want more than 3 washes- sep funnels and reactors are very inefficient tools for LLE- demo of my LLX systems is happening next week and i will tag you on the post when its up if you’re interested in an automated solution

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