What temperature and pressure do you run your roto at for solvent recovery and then decarb? I’m just curious. I turned it up to supply additional heat transfer during recovery. I’m not sure if decarb occurs under vacuum or more specifically without O2. Doing additional steps in the rotovap makes a lot of sense to me. Rotos can’t go to high vacuum usually but they can go to higher temps if you use oil instead of distilled water in the bath. There’s a lot to consider with one’s choice of oil thoug…
You don’t need a special unit to decarb oil you intend to distill. The way I do it is in the flask(s).
Method one: Put raw THCa and stuff into boiling flask. Flask goes into mantle. I stack two kugelrohr style bulbs verticle onto that. Onto the top kugelrohr I insert a ¼ barb fitting glass adapter with a glass frit. Then I pull vacuum deep as it will go. Then heating mantle on at about 100C on the mantle. Oil slowly pukes then drains back into flask helped a bit by warming the bulbs with a torc…
If you just dissolve in EtOH then evaporate, final consistency should be almost identical to starting material.
In the case of BHO as crude for distillation, the recommended protocol is to bring up in Ethanol at about 10:1 and throw it in the freezer to ppt the fats and waxes. filter or centrifuge those out, then evaporate/recover ethanol.
That WILL change the consistency. Usually towards a slightly more viscous product.
The next step is to decarboxylate. which can be done at the same time…
I decarb at 200F and then let material cool to 150F before it enters the BF and have not had any problems.
Btw, i would decarb the kief in a crockpot before extraction, so you can avoid it in the oil step. It will make things easier.
I am using a Thin Film Molecular separator. I’m only a little over a year into extraction and I am doing my best to learn and self teach as I go. I use a short path for terpine strip and decarb all my oil before it goes into the thin film. I am only achieving low 80s for my THC %. Does anyone have any suggested parameters to run this machine at to achieve higher potency. Im running my feed speed first pass 225 and second pass 125 with my evaporator at 151.2 and 141.2 degrees C, and my residue at…
I can’t for the life of me decarb without getting caramelization and burnt material. I’ve used hotplates, waterbaths and an overhead stirrer. I had best results with the water bath, but it took forever.
I also seem to lose way more than i expected, more than a third when I’m done. Staying at 115c. Last batch started with a bit more than 2.5 liters ended with 1.75 liters. Took 7 hours with magstirrer, stirred with the overhead, still caramelized the edges.
And there’s a whole lot more if you use the search and have some time and patience. I say this only partially to be snarky, but to point out that this forum is a tremendous resource and not “bulkshit.” There is a massive amount of valuable information gleaned by many years and dollars spent by a number of heavy contributors such as mr @cyclopath above. When contributors have discussed these topics at length already then someone comes in asking for that info again, essentially demanding an SOP, it’s easy to not have much patience at the ready for that individual. There is not another source of open-sourced cannabis industry info even remotely close in content to this forum. So appreciate what you have, pour yourself a cup of coffee, put on some comfy pants, and dig in.
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