Newbie needs advice! What do you guys use to clean your glass? Specifically I’m having the worst time with cleaning my short path ball with the burned leftover crude in it. Any help would be so greatly appreciated. I’ve been going through glass like nuts …
Salt and alcohol and swish it around to get the burned gunk off or if tour running etho crude it might be sugars etc water will work for that. I do salt and iso, rinse with water , rinse with iso let dry.
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Toss it and spend the 40.00 for a new one.
Foe the cost of the solvent needed (acetone), and at least 1 25hrs to clean, 40.00 new glass is justifiable in my book.
@square_root_pharms
Hes gonna give me shit again.
Lol
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Get a new boiling flask each run? Wow amd Lmao.
Look, just get a 5 gal bucket w lid, fill 75% full w acetone, drop your dirty flask in, leave it overnight and all that sludge pours out. Another rinse or two with clean acetone, and it’s usually good to go. Just get a couple extra flasks, so that when some are soaking, you’ve got clean ones to use.
I’d also recommend getting another bucket with either acetone or etoh and dropping any glass with clean distillate residue into it. Eventually you can distill the solvent, redistill residue and recover all of the distillate.
You could even recover the tails bucket the same way though it will require a few passes and yield will be low.
My ex partner would sit and scrub those flask w acetone (yeah hours sometimes) and then basically throw the acetone in the garbage. I came in with the bucket he said “I’m not chasing grams.” I responded ok, 10 grams here 10 grams there every day for 6 months adds up" he grudgingly agreed. Started using the bucket. 6 months later we had a slow day so we recovered it and ended up w 5L of good d9 in a time when money was pretty damn tight.
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I pretty much travelled all over europe for months from that extra cash
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Damn! That’s a come up! Look after the pennies and the dollars make themselves
Plus, it literally takes 3 minutes of labor to have it clean. Drop it in, wait, rinse, rinse, dry. Save money easily w less time, and not encourage single use equipment. Plus the larger you scale up, the more you you save.
I’ve since gone from a garage into a factory and we still use a similar system. I was never a fan of the ultrasonic cleaners but that would work too.
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I’ve tried nearly everything to clean my spd bf after a run. 40.00 is chump change for a 10k profit+ run.
At my work, they want clean glass. It’s their $ they pay me, so I’ll spend a week cleaning 1x bf if need be.
Lol
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I nust ran all my flask rinses and got 9L all collected 10-30gs at a time
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Heat only your bf in your mantle to around 80c with iso or ethanol (watch your vapors) then swish it around and dump out carefully. The heat is needed to get all the burnt crude re melted so to speak.
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Yea I just cleaned mine, used a heat gun with a lab stand clamp and got most of it out. Then used acetone and shook it. Within 15 mins I had it clean. Also want to point out I left it in the glass for about 2 weeks before cleaned. Hard as a rock before.
I would suggest using the guy before me method. Acetoce and use your mantel to heat up. Sounds slot easier then mine
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Smart.
You just made 27k from what these other ppl are throwing down the drain. And I’m assuming you didnt spend hours and hours cleaning when a good long soak does all the work for you.
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to clean my 5L and 10L boiling flasks i usually fill half way with ethanol, and reflux for a few hours, easy peasy. to clean my recieving flasks and anything else i let them soak in 5Ga buckets full of etoh over night, once a week i run my wash buckets, it adds up real quick. Acetone as mentioned above would be a good choice, but personally i try to keep my facility with limited amounts of solvents other than etoh for the sake of the fire marshall.
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Yes since moving into a licensed facility, I do etoh for anything but dregs, and then i still use acetone. Usually though if I’m doing short path its the dregs from my WFE so it’s already been distilled once.
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I wouldn’t mind that at all except Where do you get it for $40? The cheapest I have found is $140
Thank you ! I tried searching it but must not have searched the correct key words. This is great
Coarse Sea Salt and 190 proof etoh then 91% isopropyl after its clean of the burned residuals. Then a swish of hydrogen peroxide just to speed up evaporation and drying time. Or an ultrasonic cleaner.
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we do this with our glassware too. not the spd bf cause that’s on a whole other level, but all sticky glass goes in a bucket with eth and gets processed with our swill jars.
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I have been cleaning and Saving the clean distillate remnants with ethanol but the boiling ball has been so impossible to clean even with ethanol. Many cracked balls trying to scrub those hard to reach curves. My best clean was with hot water and cascade dry dishwashing detergent believe it or not. Got it 98% clean but took a full day of active work. Thank you !
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