It’s a learning curve for everyone - don’t feel bad. You will need that much solvent recovery no matter if you go manual - CUP - or CAPNA.
You need a centrifuge because much of the ethanol stays in the plant material. The CUP is the only one to address that within their closed loop. Most all other systems require an external centrifuge. A press is to get the very last bit plus other stuff typically after the centrifuge step.
All systems will require pretty hefty solvent recovery requirements. If you want to do 100 pounds a day you could potentially need to recovery 100 Gal of solvent/oil mixture a day.
Just have someone help you with the post processing math. Ask the guy selling the system how much ethanol will need to be recovered out of your oil and then you’ll understand (same with all systems).
Just keep in mind no matter what ethanol system you get - you have to take the ethanol out of the oil after you extract - that can be a time consuming and/expensive problem.
You would need several roto vaps or a good FFE systems to take all that ethanol out so you can use it again and then fiurther process the oil or use as is.
Or if you’re in a hurry you might want to excersize what I refer to as the “buy a clue” option. by which I mean hire a decent consultant.
Nobody has time to learn all the pieces needed to make this work in the time frame they need to absorb it in order to have a hope of succeeding, so “you should buy a clue” is not a perjorative, it is an imperative.
Last guys did get me a walk-in freezer.
used.
came with a walk in 10C too.
they even assembled the thing.
however, the refrigeration unit was declared dead by their AC guy.
they used it as a product vault for a while.
it would easily have paid for the new compressor by doubling my throughput without additional investment in less than a week (less than a day by my math!!). assuming I invested another days (the rest of a day’s) output into a still and more kegs, I’m pretty sure I could have hit 10x throughput in a month or two of optimization.
I heard they’re still planning to spin it up when they can.
I don’t see it being quite as useful with the CUP they purchased… unless they hire the right wizard
Edit: redid the math. I could not have achieved 10x back then. I had not read this thread…and would have been limited by solvent recovery to about 4x with two 20gal stills. If I recall correctly I had asked for six of them.
Just gonna drop this thread here. I’m not personally in the market for this kind of production yet, but a grower we’re working with has already invested half a million in getting 40 acres ready for hemp for the 2019 season. So if all goes well with the small scale plans, we’re going to have to be ready to scale up dramatically by October. I was thinking an expensive FFE might have been the only option until I saw this bad boy and started asking questions.
Even this one is small. We are getting a 300L system with FFE as our starter system with plans to jump to a 3000L as soon as possible. Private message me if you’d like to talk about maybe a beneficial relationship.
