first time my extractor clogs. I have the impression that it is at the level of the crc. the only difference with my other experience is that I grind the flower well before putting it in the tube. I let my ball valve close for 10min. Should I have left it open? now how do I unclog this while I have gas in the extractor?
thank you
If n2 can’t push it through. You are fucked.
Ime
Hopefully one of these wizards has some special trick. But I don’t.
If you had a crc bipass you could do that and re crc later. But doesn’t sound like this is the case…
Why did it clog? Are you running cold?
Isolate each column and burp low pressure nitrogen up the column from the bottom and vent the top port to atmosphere momentarily. Cut the nitrogen, resume pressure on the headspace, and you’ll be back in business.
watch your pressures if youre using nitrogen to push a clog, its a day old question so im sure you got something done. what made it clog.
burbing up into crc isnt a good tek but maybe you could rerun it. its a day old topic so hopefully he responds. if he was runnning cold i couldve been water in a valve. I have extra valves to bypass the crc if this happens. It did kinda happen but it was the bottom valve got ice in it.
thanks for your advices. It was my 1 micron filter in the crc which I believe was. however I wash it with iso after each use.
normally you change this filter after how much use?
Hard to answer with broken english. Is there a language barrier here, or is that just how you type?
Your CRC filter should not be clogging, and you should be stacking paper filters ahead of it, to make your welded filter only handle rips and blowby of the paper filters.
Do you guys think that running dry material through crc without freezing prior to extraction will cause issues with flow rate?
Normally runs are packed and placed in cryo till next day then processed, an extractor in the facility I work at did a run without it being frozen before extraction and he took god damn near 4 hours to complete the run (mep30) I’ve ran crc in the same situations with minimal to no problems. The employee thinks it was ‘cause since it wasn’t kept frozen and was dry material, the top of the crc cake got clogged with fats…… thoughts? I’m just trying to justify why it took so damn long to do one run. Obviously because of “the clog”
What y’all think?
if you start cold and its getting warm at some point it can make ice in the system.
Solvent, coils and material columns are all kept cold either with chillers or dry ice. The material wasn’t frozen it was just dry trim. Thanks thumps.
99.99998% of clogs are from running cold causing the moisture in the sorbents to freeze and blind. 00.00001% is from ppl running crcs that are too thin or too tall. The last 00.00001% is from ppl who have a overpowered recovery that is causing the sintered disc to freeze.
My clogs come when I try to redissolve in material column. The drain spout clogs
I like to use a fritted filter plate when redissolving oils. It allows for solvent to get underneath it and any oil that seeps through the holes is small enough to move through the lines
Thanks I’ll throw one on
Another trick is to throw the oil in a sock and then throw the sock on the fritted plate. It ensures all the oil is fully dissolved
It’s that shitty ETS column if you’re using it, I run an MEP30 and wound up retrofitting a 6inch column and modifying the mounting bracket to accommodate it. Going from 6 to 2 inch sucks, even with high-flow media. Also, depending on the chiller you’re running into your jackets and injection coil, you might have a problem with warm solvent picking up moisture. Huber 902s with siloil cannot actually push fluid through the system, the oil is too viscous for the pump at -60. Don’t let anyone see you do it, but add ~750mls of ethanol to your bath and it’ll thin the oil out enough to circulate. You’ll notice a pretty dramatic temperature drop through the injection immediately.
@thumper I definitely wouldn’t recommend backflowing nitrogen if you’re not rerunning material. Using some pre-blended media like CRX is advisable if you have frequent clogs, though, just because channeling won’t really effect performance if you have to. You can also get away with 5um disks if you run a ton of solvent trough to pick up any fines, which dramatically increases flow.
Thanks for the replies, I always run cold and have either no issues or minimal issues. Always finish a run in about 2hrs. I was just seeking opinions referring to the start material being dry and not frozen before extraction causing fats to stack on top of media cake. Makes sense to me what wax plug says though. I just feel like the filtration paper we use at the base isn’t being replaced.
Also, We don’t use the mep crc spool, built our own and placed a mount on the side where the dewax chamber would originally go. Works great.
I just freeze media at the bottom of the biomass columns now. Works like a dream
blow hot smoke up it’s ass…