Cannot maintain hot water bath

Hey everyone, as the title says, I’m unable to maintain my hot water bath temp (85*F) and not sure how to proceed. The problem is that when injecting the n-tane into the system initially, I forgot to have my slurry level on my jacketed column lower, and it started bubbling slurry out the top a little bit. It apparently caused some of my threaded tape (or fittings – not sure exactly) to break down (acetone and dry ice slurry) and I was getting very small gas leaks. Thankfully I didn’t have any ignition sources going anyways, but my next step would have been to put the sous vide in the bath to keep the 85 temp throughout recovery. Since it was not safe to do so because of low gas readings, I have just had to let it do it’s thing in the cold water. I’m still occasionally getting a small reading on one particular spot underneath the top of the collection pot. On the 1-5 scale of my meter, it’s a 1 and stays at a 1 when it picks it up.

I had a friend not use a hot water bath before and when he opened his collection pot at the end, he just had basically a yellow/honey colored liquid with a water-ish consistency. Any advice on how to proceed from here?

With a recovery unit or without ?

Sous vide in bucket in sepearate area…cycle the water w the pump into the room w vessel and tub

Then you sous vide and pump aren’t into the same area

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Or buckets of hot water like 5 years back hauling hot water left and right :joy:

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Oooo nooo not anymore that shit!

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Those where the day s skunk pharm and fucking around :joy:

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I have a sparkless recovery pump going. And yeah that’s what I was doing originally was manually scooping the cold water out, filling in 85*F hot water. But it was obviously an imperfect system and the collection pot is still pretty cold. If I open it up at the end and there is golden water-like liquid in the pot, what should I do?

Yust keep system closed keep recovering and make sure your collection pot is of the botom of your water bath for if not it will freeze up
Patience is the name of the game and keep swapping water with warm water

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What if my dumb ass already let the recovery pump take it down to -19inHg and already disassembled everything except for taking the top lid assembly off? Any way to salvage anything from here?

Yes as long as you shut the recovery unit down before letting air in the cls
If it was running you will need to burp your gas
But you can close her up
Pull a vac as low as she go s or burp your lines and proceed recovering

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Yeah I shut the recovery unit off. Once -19inHg was reached, I closed all valves, turned off the recovery pump, took coil out of dry ice slurry and put it in hot water to get residual butane out of the line, and then closed vapor valve on tank. Then I opened the Input valve and liquid valve to equalize pressure in the column and collection pot, then started disassembling.

I haven’t taken the lid assembly off yet, although I’m curious to see what it’s looking like. Could I take lid assembly off and look, or should I just hook everything back up like I was running again? Should I use vacuum pump to pull the system down to -29inHg, remove vacuum line and pump, and then let recovery pump do it’s thing? Also, I somehow ended up with what looks like wax slightly gunked up inside the bi-directional fitting and the end of the hose that was connected to it. Hopefully I didn’t ruin my system

Sorry for all the stupid newbie questions, but this has thrown me a curve ball and it’s not like i was super experienced to begin with

Nah your fine
You can pull a vac with a diafragm pump and a rotary vane also works yust keep an eye on your solvent to start boiling
The recovery unit also works yust detach it from your solvent tank and let it blow in the room or window

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The bidirectional wax is probably deu to solvent/crude getting held up and once the solvent evaporates the wax stays
Nothing to worry about
Yust clean the lines with some fresh tane flowing treu

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I really appreciate all your responses man. This is what I ended up with at the end. Not perfect but I was expecting worse

Is it fucked?

Looks good :ok_hand:
So purging time good luck

Ps Whats that looks like dental floss tread ??

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I might just be an idiot, because for the life of me I can’t seem to piece together how to get one of these circulator pumps working. For example, this pump: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Watts-HRWS-Universal-Steel-Water-Heater-Recirculating-Pump/3135231?cm_mmc=shp-_-c-_-prd-_-rpe-_-google-_-lia-_-209-_-waterheaters-_-3135231-_-0&store_code=288&placeholder=null&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0POeq6Gr5gIVl8VkCh1jFgH5EAQYASABEgJqJfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

It seems like you are supposed to connect it to the piping above your hot water heater. Would it just sit inside the hot water bath from the sous vide? Do I just need some other sort of simple pump (and hoses) to move water from the bucket with the sous vide to the collection pot bath? How would cold water be removed from the collection pot bath and recirculated? How would it know when to do so?

I’m probably overlooking something very simple, but I’ve never worked with pumps at all before so I’m missing some basics

What type of setup are you running? And what’s the product your trying to manufacture?

I have a Mk3 Terpenator and I’ve got it down how to make shatter and all the other variables in the operation I think. But the problem is I’m having these very small leaks around the PTFE tape on the fittings (I assume from the acetone slurry boiling over from the jacketed column onto the lid assembly when I injected the gas) and don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to properly replacing that at the moment. So I figure since the leaks are very small (1 dot out of 5) and don’t seem to be pooling up around the system and are sporadic, that if I have a sous vide in a bucket 15-20 feet away and pipe the warm water to the collection pot bath, that I’ve eliminated my ignition sources.

Take off the parts in concern, retape. Then tighten it back down and pressure test to make sure you fixed the leak

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How do you pressure test? If you vac the system down, does the soapy spray bottle method work? I assumed you had to be creating positive pressure for it to work, which I thought required injecting gas