Currently running an Apeks and generally curious about what kind of success others have had extracting live material with CO2 systems. I haven’t seen a whole lot of people attempting this on a commercial scale so I’m also wondering if I’m not seeing an economic barrier that would prevent this from being feasible. Any info would be appreciated!
2 Likes
Running CO2 extraction on anything with water in it is… Hard. Can for sure be done but it can be very system dependent if you are able to reach extraction pressure without turning your extraction vessels into a swamp. Most of the time you end up just drying the material with the CO2 which is about the most miserable use of a very expensive piece of industrial equipment I can think of.
Also most systems will ice up like a motherfucker if you don’t play the banjo just right
2 Likes
Not typically, it’s kind of our bread and butter and the owners are very protective of their parameters right now because of the struggle to stay alive in this industry. I signed an NDA in fact
1 Like
You might be able to run your subcritical terp run without pulling too much water as it’s more non-polar…
Then heat that whole thing up (maybe throw a stream of hot nitrogen in there?) Up to 130c and hold it for an hour (decarb that shit). Then maybe suck down your collector with deep vacuum and your water should boil out.
Then do the rest of your thc run like normal?
I’m just guessing at all this… But I think it might work in theory?
I think in terms of “live” runs that avoid the icing issue with decompression without really cranking the heat on the collection side of your system there are two options and both are questionably “live”. One would be freeze dryer, should reduce the terpene recombination that accompanies traditional drying. Second that I’ve heard is doing a traditional dry and pulling it at around 30 AW. Pulverizing material that wet is a whole different conversation but you can check out Fritsch, they have some pretty tanky grinders. Still probably going to see relatively significant resin loss during your grinding step. Higher moisture content is still going to give you a significant hydrosol fraction in your terpene collection but it should be more manageable than totally fresh material.