I have since stopped using celite in my closed loop and have only been using it with ethanol in an open buchner set up. Im using a 1 micron glass microfiber filter on top of an n.o.boler 1 micron welded sintered disc.
This is what the extract looks like after its been dissolved in ethanol, winterized and reduced
The only thing that I can think of is that there is water in the celite. I put it in an oven at 250F, no vac over the weekend and it did not loose any water weight.
I currently have some in an oven set to 350F and 2/3 vac and there is moisture condensing on the door so it looks like 250F and no vac might not have been enough.
try useing t5, silica 60, magnesium silicate, and a top layer of the t-41.
You will have better luck with a non polar hydrocarbon as well.What ever you are seeing could be something that the solvent interacted with or a ph change. Where do you get your diatamacious earth and what brand is it?
The end goal is indeed to remove color with the other adsorbents however at the moment I am just trying to figure out why the celite is making everything come out dark so I can use it as a filter aid to keep the other adsorbents back. If I can’t get the celite to stop acting funny then I am going to try a run without it next week. Is anyone running without celite?
I have been playing around with celite 545 from two different sources as well as some food grade DE:
So far the food grade has given me the least trouble when it comes to contaminating the solution… which seems very strange. I’ve had all three kinds of DE in the oven at 350F over night and they seem to have lost some water weight.
How much longer is it taking you to move your tane inline through celite. Celite doesnt do much for color. Im thinking the added time its taking is picking up more undesirables causing the darker color
I repeated the procedure today with t-5, silica and magnesol instead of the celite and got the same results. Now I am starting to think that I am not getting all of the alconox solution from the ultrasonic bath rinsed out of the disc. Anytime I put glass or steel with residual BHO in the bath the water color turns really dark.
Rinse the disk well with distilled h20 and blow it with compressed air. Repeat that a few times and you should be good. you can also boil the disks out in distilled h20.
Confirmed! I boiled down some alconox solution til it was dry and added some bho dissolved in ethanol and applied some heat. As soon as the ethanol evaporated and the extract started getting warm it also got really dark.
After the ultra sonic bath I rinsed it with tap water, then distilled water, let it simmer in a rice cooker with distilled water, then put it on bottom of a 4" x 42" column and pushed 10 gallons of distilled water in 2 gallon increments thru it at 15 PSI and it STILL has some alconox solution in it. The edges of the disc seem to be the problem area
