Once i first used butane and made a second run with dme. The butane extract always had been more gold, think dme also pulls a little chlorophyll as the extract look a little greenish right after extraction.
I am smoking the extract since two days and i really like it. I thinks its a little harsh but thats from the terps i guess. I read somewhere that low temp terps should taste as described.
There are definitely a lot of waxes in it also a lot of terps i guess. I tried to cure it as cold and gentle as possible.
I will do a run with dried material in a few weeks then i will winterize and crystallize then i can give a proper info about the thc content 
You have any parameter ?
Hello, as said a few weeks ago I made a run on dry material.
I used 53g dry material.
Parameters are the same as last time, everything running as cold as possible with di
This time i used Butane, i made 4 Runs
due to all the extraction look similar clear i poured them together after extraction.
let the noids crystallize for 48hours which gave me small crystalls. I was very curoius about the 4 runs because after crystallization and i had no terps ? that happened the first time that i was left with just crystals. It got me 4.56 g crystalline THC.
Then i thought i will do another run with DME because i had a liitle left, made a 5th run wit 500 ml dme for 15mins which gave me another 2.5g of crude. Unfortunately i had no more dry ice for winterizing… But i think most of the terps are in the dme crude. You also cant smell a thing on the crystals but the dme extract smells wonderful.
After i got my crystals i decarbed them in a closed vessel at 55°C for 24 hours. i was left with a nice half decarbed Oil which i filled into charts.
not the beautiest crystals but theyll do the work
So in total i got a little under 20% crystalline, unfortunately i fucked one up and spilled some on the ground.
Most n-alkanes are pretty terrible solvents, meaning they don’t have a high capacity for solubilizing because they are so non-polar. Ethers are slightly better, but because it has a lone pair on the oxygen, it can interact with much more polar molecules (diethyl ether can dissolve organic salts!) so you are likely going to pull other compounds. Chlorophyll could be one, but some less polar pigments can come along as well. A lower temperature may help you in this case.
You mentioned there was a bad smell in your biomass at the end, did it smell like the DME or did it smell funny?
I ask because ethers carry a significant safety concern with them because they can react with oxygen and form explosive peroxides. This is the same mechanism that makes cooking oil/butter go rancid so you may actually be smelling that; if you are then extracting again with butane, you may actually have peroxide in your product.
A way to test for this can be simply with peroxide test strips, or with glacial acetic acid and sodium iodide (if it turns brown, you have peroxide since it’s is reducing iodide to iodine); this may be difficult with DME since it’s boiling point is so low, but if you can chill some to -40 and drop it into the test solution, that may work, or do it in your vessel.
This is why most people steer clear of oxygenated solvents (THF, dioxane, ethyl ether, and more) because the peroxide formation is a serious safety hazard.
I have been messing around with DME cans (yeah, I know, cans are questionable, lol) for the last 4 months and I’m really enjoying it so far. I would agree with the folks saying it produces an extract with better flavor.
Been extracting super premium material, and yields have been between 32-36% on every run. A lot of trop cookies x mimosa, and several kushmints crosses, all of them are proven clones for high quality extracts. Because I’m using proven hash varieties my experience could be very different than what others have seen.
As far as parameters, I just used a deep freezer at the lowest setting, packed my tube in the lab, bagged it up, then left tube & solvent cans in the freezer overnight. I clean all the extraction equipment in my cell culture lab between each run, so it’s got zero environmental particulate.
I use press club teflon sheets to line the Pyrex pan, I’m not sure if DME will react with parchment.
Here’s the results from the first time I ran some. Those round mini slabs at the end are 22-25 grams each.
This is an Imgur gallery link, copy and paste it into your browser then remove the spaces.
Here’s a number of studies on elastomer compatibility, seems like PTFE is the only gasket material that’s listed as compatible across every study. I think this solvent is an excellent candidate for Tef-Steel gaskets, since it gets almost as cold as propane the tef-steel gaskets should have a coefficient of thermal expansion that’s closer to the closed loop itself.
I did this research because I recently purchased a 25lb tank of DME from BVV to run with my alphatek cls, and wanted to be sure that I don’t go boom. Hopefully BVV will publish updated elastomer compatibility information on their site. I already forwarded this link to Avery Benitez at BVV.
Second imgur link w/elastomer info, copy and paste then remove spaces.
Hey welcome @Indianajones420 nice first post. Solid info. That’s the nicest lookin dme extract I’ve ever seen. Good luck w your research!
Hi thanks for you`re answer, always like to learn new things also behind the chemistry from the plant and solvents etc.
I read the thread again but coulndt find the part where i was mentioning that it smelled bad.
As far as i remember the smell was good, as soon as the ether was gone it the extract smelled 1:1 like the life plant.
Thanks for the advice with the peroxide stripes ! We are using them in our company so its easy to get them:)
Hi Indianajones420,
cool first post thanks for that!
So I have some questions.
First, what are your soak times and how much solvent did you use?
When you are curing your product, how are you doing that?
I put my vacc chamber into DI and then I pull a gentle vacuum wait until i have ambient pressure and pull vacc again, until i think im done. My thinking is coming from, i already did some purging and the extracts i purged like that way havent had a lot of residuals left. Unfortunately its a pretty long time ago i have to check if i got the analyses somewhere.
Although after a few days the extract is turning from wax/liquid to solid and more crumble although I have stored it on a cold dark place. Did this happened to you to?
How’s the biomass smell after extraction?
I haven`t really smelled it, but i kept it. i will smell it once i come back to my work place then i can tell you.
Our plant packages DME. We found many warnings of DEE, diethyl ether forming peroxides when exposed to O2 / air over periods of time, but nothing about DME doing that same. Not sure why that’s the case, but it is.
While cheap rubber gaskets will fail with exposure to DME, both nylon and PTFE gaskets / gaskets encapsulated with these materials are resistant.
It may be because the primary carbon, the methyl, isn’t stable enough to form a peroxide; pretty much all other peroxide warnings are with secondary carbons, still do test with peroxide strips if possible.
Since this is also handled in tanks and can’t be exposed to air, it’s not a real issue since there isn’t much contact with air.
The biomass has zero smell, even tried breaking some up for curiosity’s sake. I don’t pack very tight though, only 1.5g/in³.
No soak, just running straight through. 66 grams per tube, 875 grams of solvent or about 2.5 cans.
I’m at a pretty high elevation, 6k feet, so vacuum chambers are a little different. My vac chamber method is to close off all air to the chamber and let it pull until the muffin gets close to the same size as the initial DME solution on the teflon sheet. Then continue to make big muffins until it won’t swell up much. After those first (usually 3) muffins I will draw max vacuum and let it sit at 85 for an hour, then burp and draw max vac again and let it sit for 2 hours, then 3, then 4, then I usually let it sit at max vac until I wake up in the morning. The next day I will burp and draw 2 times, then another time before bed, at which point I switch to every 12 hours until the end of day 3.
Mine has been very stable shatter, but I can post process into a very snappy wax using a seedling heat mat. One batch came out a little crumbly but I’m not sure why.
I just noticed that on my first response there appears to only be a video? Do you see a link to the whole imgur gallery or is it just that muffin video?
That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.
Have you ever considered terpene extraction before?
I have not, but I don’t get along with pure terpenes very well. Sensory processing disorder effects my sense of smell, and smells of that magnitude make me disoriented or straight up light headed. It feels like my consciousness or thought process is being overwhelmed with stimulation, it’s not a pleasant sensation.
Did you extract the green smell too? Using the dme.
Not at all, it even brought out some smells that were so subtle in the flower you couldn’t taste them. One of the kushmints crosses has a light cherry vanilla note that doesn’t come through when smoked, but you could taste it really well in the extract.
I think that’s enough information for me to want to do some testing. Sounds like DME is gonna be the clear winner for solvent steam tek.
