New user and new to the industry. I’m looking to make feco at home. I’m a disabled veteran and would prefer to learn to make it properly. Not looking to spend more than $1,000. Is this even feasible in that price range?
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Absolutely. Get your self some 190 proof ethanol for your extraction solvent, Two 5 gallon buckets, one for your extraction vessel one for pouring into when you filter out the biomass. An easy starting point for good saturation will be 1 gallon of ethanol to one pound of biomass or About 8.5mL of ethanol per gram of biomass. Place your biomass in the ethanol make sure it’s completely saturated and let rest for 15 minutes. Poor the solution through cheese cloth to quickly filter out any biomass particles and use the cheese cloth to ring the material out as best you can. Now to decarboxylate your oil as well as boil off the ethanol I’ve found a crock pot set to low/med, depending on the model, will slowly boil off your ethanol and decarb your remaining oil very effectively. You can use a non contact thermometer to verify temps, Ethanol boils around 173F, keep that in mind when boiling off your ethanol. A good decarb temp after you’ve got your solution reduced down to a black oil will be around 225F. You will know decarb has finished when all bubbles have stopped and you’re looking at a pool of pristine black feco oil. Be very careful about the fumes generated while boiling off the ethanol as they will be VERY flammable. I strongly recommend doing this step outside on a porch, back yard etc…
Use a silicone paddle to scrape out the crock pot interior and gather your oil into a mason jar.
Hope this helps.
Items Required:
Everclear
2 5 gallon buckets
crock pot
cheese cloth
non contact thermometer (IR thermometer)
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Also, search in the top right… “bucket tech” theres a lot of info around this site concerning different methods people use.
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Bucket tek should get you most of the way there.
This might be worth a read as well:
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With a $1k budget, I’d add a panda and actual solvent recovery.
(Whole section on that: Solvent Recovery - Future4200)
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Small chinese rotovaps are cheap these days & pot stills are even cheaper. I’d get a vevor pot still for etoh recovery and a vac chamber for the final purge.
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I’m just a home grower/extractor. I built a DIY ethanol extraction unit that also reclaims the ethanol. Cost less than $1000, including the vacuum. Safe enough to run in my kitchen. It’s easy to do with a little direction.
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Pictures or it didn’t happen…
Agreed. Easily achieved.
Can you share pictures and build details?
(Maybe over in Solvent Recovery - Future4200 somewhere…)
@urbancby check out Who is king of EToH Recovery? and follow some of the links under the first post. There is a huge amount information on the subject.
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This is what it looked like right after I put it together last year. I’ve made a few minor mods, but that’s it. Yes, that really is a canning kettle repurposed for a condenser. Works pretty well for folks who just want to run their own stuff and make a few fun things, while recovering their ethanol. The whole thing, including the cart was maybe $600-$700. I have no special skills or talent.
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Between the replies I have gotten here, I definitely feel a lot more confident.
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Is the tops on those see through? I like the setup you have for sure. Not what I thought about at all. What was the original kit that you purchased?
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The lid tops are glass with ports. They are custom lids from BVV. I learned to build this system from a Facebook group called IchiBan’s Extractor Lounge. A guy by the name of Troy Ivan who used to be involved with ExtractCraft came up with the idea. It’s actually pretty cool and easy to build/use. I just grow my own and produce about 20 lbs of flower each year, so I’m pretty small scale. This system is easy to assemble with parts from BVV and Amazon. If you like simple projects, this is perfect. Here are a couple of links for how it works and how to build your own. I’ve got a shopping list for the parts I can share.
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