1.10k for the short path this guy is rocking. you made mention of a 5 figure investment.
2. i would never spend that money on that… but thats besides the point. my point wasnt “theyre using a 12k system so they can afford an 80k system” it was that theyre distilling 2.5L of cannabis a pop, i think they can afford to invest in a wiper. key word being invest.
3. what pump are you putting on this system thatll meaningfully lower the vacuum?
Increasing your mantle temp 10 or 20C should speed it up a lot. I had this problem with a 2L LS G2. Pump being underpowerd is one issue, but like you, I wasn’t being aggressive enough with mantle temp. I bought an air mattress for work and would often sleep there when I was doing distillations. I’d try and keep vapor temp as low as possible resulting in 14 hour days to distill less than 1L of crude.
Now, with the same pump, my distillations days are just over 8 hours with some of that being set up and break down. Now instead of collecting mains at a vapor temp of 165C I collect b/w 180 and 195 or 200C.
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I think the idea with a new pump is to get something with higher CFM value. $900 for that seems low though.
E2M28 is 21CFM, which is a 25% increase in flow rate, with a lower ultimate vac (0.0001 mbar = 0.075Micron). Used on eBay (needing a rebuild) $900 on a good day. A $200 rebuild kit and a good clean, it’ll run like new.
Just because you’re running 2.5L don’t mean you have free capital to invest in a wiper. Overhead, purchasing more feed material, etc, these things subtract from an investment budget. I mean to say you won’t have success telling people “y’all should just buy a wiper”…they have 10s of thousands of dollars to invest into other shit first, I can say that with certainty.
Edit: literally first search result for “used e2m28 eBay” https://www.ebay.com/itm/Edwards-E2M28-Dual-Stage-Rotary-Vane-Mechanical-Vacuum-Pump-220v-1ph/233700373792?epid=10014898007&hash=item3669a0b520:g:LNkAAOSwYl5fT-FF
Edit 2/3/4: wrong link, added units of micron for vac, syntax
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No, you can go straight to 175 and let heads drip. Then walk it up to 193ish for main body. All boiling flask temp.
Basically it takes advantage of how slowly mains comes over at 175 while all the heads will rush out. Then you just let it drip until the slow distillation of mains takes over from the heads and looks good. Then increase to 193, start collecting mains somewhere between 175-193 when it starts to speed up.
All these temps depend on your system geometry and vacuum levels
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I don’t remember what was even happening in this run. This picture shows the no bullshit approach though.
The two lines to watch are the red and blue. Red line is the boiling flask temperature and blue is the vapor temperature.
Where the blue line has a bump or plateau you have fractions.
Because all the stuff before THC/CBD is junk in almost all cases we just burn through it. Why spend time purifying it just to throw it away? These early volatile compounds also contain absolutely no THC because the boiling point is so different.
On the graph where the two lines go parallel on the far right is heads and the beginning of body. The shoulder region is definitely heads. Then I look for the stability of the lines as a guide.
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thats a weird statement. and you seem to be personally offended, or at least fairly worked up, about me making an off hand comment about getting a wiper. for the record, for anyone in the business of distilling a lot of cannabis, a wiper is a good investment. im not sure what problem you have with that.
oh and you posted a $1200 pump (+$120 shipping), not to mention the minor repair kit runs for ~$200, while the major repair kit is $400 or more. and then your vac grease.
you just advised this guy to spend between $1500-$2k plus rebuilding a pump, (hope nothing goes wrong!) all for what? pulling your fraction a degree or two lower? that strikes me as not great advice
nice graph! @Chimney100 this right here. one nice ramp on your pot, and the vapor temp ends up looking like stairs, each plateau a fraction. as long as youre not adding way too much heat, youll end up with a beautiful effect like that. love the data capture, but even more the display!
0.075 micron vs 40 micron is leaps and bounds.
I would always suggest a wiper at scale, but when someone wants a quick fix for vacuum problems (which was the original intent of the OP) the typical fixes are: beefier vacuum pump, fix leaks.
I’m not offended, different strokes for different folks. All I know is what has worked for me and my clients.
As far as the price of the vacuum pump and repair kit. I said “$900 on a good day” and I stand by it. And if you can’t find a set of gaskets and some oil for $200 then you need to keep searching. It’s there.
Edit: didn’t you just say that people running an spd should just buy a wiper like it’s no thing, now we’re talking about a $500 price difference? What am I missing?
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Thanks!
I guess since vacuum is a conversation I will add that the yellow line a measure of the vacuum. It is AET or atmospheric equivalent temperature. The faint yellow, not the orange.
THC and CBD have an AET of just about 420 depending on the day. Look up nomograph sigma aldrich and play with it. AET or whatever you want to call it is very important to grasp and will help keep your runs consistent.
You vac might be on its last legs one run so you need to push the temps up 10 degrees. But where are you in your fractions respectively? Punch pressure and temperature in a calculator and figure out where you are.
Pressure tends to further drop as you get into the body and away from heads. I normally see a gradual drop to about 0.01-0.05 mmHg or 10-50 micron. Especially when you are running quicker like this.
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Is the yellow line the difference between the red and blue?
The orange line is the “Pot minus vapor” delta. The faint yellow line is different.
I love the data y’all provide. The people saying just get a wfd are sadly right. The amount of money you’ll waste on bullshit SPD runs will pay for a wiper 5x over. The best sops I’ve seen use a br for first pass and a wiper for second pass and the oil is consistent and pure and they make money every time they run.
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Thank you so much for your suggestion, I’ll definitely try using a higher temp when running and aim for a vapor temp higher than 175C… The problem is that we’ve tried this before and noticed that we got a decrease in potency. When we run slow we come back testing 87% - 90%, running faster with higher temps gives us a lower potency of D9, could the lower potency be something else and not the distillation technique we’re using? We can consistently get 85%+ D9 using the procedure we use now.
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Thank you for the gaph for clearing things up,
my question is, does this mean that the mantle temperature has no direct effect on the vapor temperature and the only variable thats important is time?
From my understanding, we go through each BF temp slowly and carefully because we don’t want to miss any fractions so we can get the most potent distillate without contaminating our main body with heads. Holding the BF temps when we know that we are going through a fraction and we hold it at that temperature to ensure that none of that fraction gets into our main body.
What I see on this graph is, you kept the BF temp at the same temperature setting, and the distillation goes through each fraction by itself without needing to adjust the temp. Only variable is time, and the longer you held it at that temperature the more fractions it goes through and eventually you get to your main body.
Can you clarify if this is true?
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I’m not sure I am understanding your question. The time is just progress not really a variable. It is if you consider that you can’t get to the next fraction without going through the one before unless you give it a huge excess of energy or the fractions were close in temperature.
What you are missing I think is that pressure adjustments were made through the run. It is harder to see on the graph. If you use the full power of your vacuum for early volatile fractions you WILL trash it sooner or later. So start high and walk it down incrementally.
So two things or three if including time change in the run. Pressure and temperature. We ramp the boiling flask temp and decrease the pressure (increase vacuum). This is why a good pump is such an important piece. Everyone can heat shit up. But can you suck?
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Does this same concept of not being able to get to the next fraction without going through the one before apply to wiped film evaporators? We’re seeing a significant amount of cannabinoids in our early volatile fractions.
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Therr should only be 3 fractions, heads, mains, tails.
I also go low n slow ramping temps up. I hold at 180c mantle temp for as long as heads are dripping. Drips slow tuna crawl, bump mantle to 185c. Drips come back and a few mins later it slowly thickens and slightly begins to coil. Increase to 190c, wait 5 mins, then 195c and it should he a nice coil. I wait 2 mins, then swap collection flasks to collect mains.
This is all 50 microns or less. It can take 6hrs for a run on average.
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the principle is as follows and i think its something a lot of people on here are not fully understanding:
your crude cannabis oil is a homogeneous solution. say you have cannabis oil and ethanol - once the solution hits the boiling point of ethanol, it will hold there until all of the ethanol is boiled off. the temp wont/cant rise until the ethanol is gone.
this is the theoretical, understand that with an incredibly complex solution (cannabis extract) there will be many other factors that come into play. what that means for us, among other things, is that you can absolutely “overpower” the natural progression.
on a wiper you wont be able to manipulate this phenomenon. by the time your oil has reached the place that it will boil, you havent done any separating on the way up heating. you then are relying on an instantaneous flash to one of your condensers, which aint gonna happen unless its very volatile. which is probably not happening based on traditional wiper sop. its worth noting in general, a wiper doesnt have nearly the separatory ability of a traditional spd
you shouldnt have a ton of fractions with a wiper. talk to me about your wiper process.
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Didn’t meant to make fractions plural, it’s just one volatile fraction. We run an initial terpene cut at approximately 142 - 145c, vacuum is dependent on the volatile content of the resin but goes as high as 200mTorr, then slowly creeps down to 40 - 75mTorr as terpenes are distilled. We’re finding some of these terpene cuts are containing up to 70% TAC.
Temperatures are ramped up for main distillation after terpene cut is complete.
I apologize if I don’t fully understand the concept, I have very little scientific background save for all the reading I do on here.