With all the gas issues out there right now, is anyone happy with their current supplier?
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No one has a consistent supply of clean gas if that is your question.
Your best bet is to find a supplier that is acknowledging the issues and working on solutions and isn’t denying that it exists.
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And, take responsibility for your own lab by distilling your gas through media or a water wash prior to use EVERY TIME.
Some of @Graywolf 's most impactful work was around mystery oil. Here we area decade+ later and the center still holds. If you want clean solvent, clean it.
Find someone you like, who gives great customer service and cars about your business. Then, get your one-time deliveries and clean your gas.
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Lot of dirty coffee cups around here, even among the clean coffee cup-salesmen.
What gas suppliers acknowledge the fact that the gas they’re getting is tainted?
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I have gotten the best results with Instrument Grade gas from Apis Labs, but always pre-distill my gas anyway. It is never a question of whether Mystery Oil exists, only how much is present.
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Heres a thread for oil and gas workers where they are discussing I think the same issue.
they are saying possibly an amine is co-distilling with butane, at least in their situation.
I agree always pre-distill every batch.
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*Medusa: *
maybe she’s born with it?
Maybe it’s codistilling amine…
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We work directly with our manufacture and know that keeping everything cleaned is a major concern. Mistakes sometimes happen, and unfortunately it’s not always caught until it gets to the end user. No manufacture is gonna be perfect. I think the good ones really try hard to be as perfect as possible. Sometimes though, sh!t happens.
Example: We had a small batch of ethanol ship direct to a customer. It was immediately found that there was a contaminate. The manufacturer shut down everything and did an investigation into the problem. It was found that an employee (newer) had not cleaned and purged a pump system out when switching chemicals. The batch was very small, so it was contained immediately. Of course our customer was very mad at us, as we were the ones that sold the product. The manufacturer stepped up and made it right with our customer and with us. Did we lose the customer? Temporarily. Have we earned that customer back? Yes we have. They came back after trying somewhere else and found that our customer service was leaps and bounds ahead of the other company and that we had only had the one problem. The other company has had more than a few.
So things happen sometimes, totally out of the control of the wholesale/retail shop. Acknowledging that mistakes happen is the first step in correcting them. Nobody is perfect, but we sure strive to be.
Other issues to admit: Shipping. Once the product is on the freight trucks, it’s very hard to do anything about problems. We had a large shipment get placed on a train by mistake and would no way make it to our customer on time. We had to ship out another entire order, on our dime, to the customer and hurry it up, which was not cheap. But we did it because that’s the right thing to do for the customer. It wasn’t their fault and they needed the product. We worked it all out with them and got them taken care of. So there are just somethings we can’t control, but we do our best to react to them and take care of the customer. I would hope that other supply companies take pride in their work as well.
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So, I think I hear you say that you agree that extractors should be pre-distilling and filtering their gas prior to use.
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Absolutely, we always recommend for customers to do pre-distilling and filtering. It’s really the safest and best way for the labs to make sure everything is 100%. I would love to be able to tell customers that they don’t need to or make the claim that they don’t ever need to with our gas. But that’s an unrealistic claim, and companies that make those kind of claims aren’t being realistic with their customers.
I think many people need to understand the percentages sometimes. A manufacturer may have a bad batch. Lets say 100 bottles of whatever. Everyone gets upset because they had a problem and that is totally understandable, as I’m sure I’d be super pissed if it happened to me. But what some people don’t look at are the thousands upon thousands of bottle without an issue. If they bottled 10,000 bottles ok, and 100 not, that’s only a 1% problem rate. Whats the actual percentage of problems? Most likely, its a really small percent, I’m guessing less than half of a percent.
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I appreciate your response! 
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New new Gas from @GasLogix-Adam has shown to be promising.
You gonna talk about your fire gas yet Adam?
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Last tank I got my hands on seemed ok. I’ve always distilled my gas first, and the amount of mystery oil has definitely increased over the past two years. From wiping out a little coating, to mopping up a puddle as well.
No sir. Little place in sw Michigan. I’d have to check and see where they are pulling it from.
Addressing the elephant in the room, it seems that the current Medusa and fast crash issue has affected gas supply nationwide. I have spoken with customers who have experienced these issues with our gas, as well as gas from other sources. It would be expected that a business wouldn’t want to advertise that they are experiencing issues, but they should be honest when asked.
We aren’t immune to the issue at hand any more than the next guy. We do want to be part of the solution, and are actively looking for topics of research to find solutions to these problems. We have an analytical chemist with years of hydrocarbon experience on retainer, in hopes of working directly with extractors experiencing these problems. We also have some older gas from before Medusa reared her head set aside for comparative analysis or side by side runs, in hopes of helping to find some answers.
Transparency is important to working together to find solutions. We are being as transparent as possible with customers and industry greats, such as you, the person reading this right now. I am happy to share info and ideas any time, and will share as much as possible without breaking nda’s or releasing sensitive info. Unfortunately, our efforts can only go so far. We are focused on the extraction industry, but you guys are the extractors, the people with the hands on knowledge and experience, the ones dealing with these issues and workarounds every day. Our knowledge and informational resources can only go so far without guidance from you as a community.
If anyone is interested in working together on these issues, or even just offering ideas for testing pre Medusa gas against new gas, please reach out.
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my last tank had lots of black carbon crap in it. it was off ebay but i think that seller is on here too.
I feel like you’re jumping the horse, when we haven’t established we have a working method. I understand, you’re a saleswoman, but industrial lubricants and this “medusa” issue are quite separate, and let’s be honest, you can see the mystery oils, and prove you’ve removed them with a subsequent distillation. We even have ~10 year old test results from Grey Wolf’s original exploration of mystery oil.
There’s no solid test for our medusa contaminant, no public data or testing on the species of the contaminants, just conjecture. I understand the desire to sell the shit out of an idea, but I think we need to kick the tires a little harder.
Let’s ask a few people that are strong contributors, and at least one with a standing offering of 10,000 dollars to repair the medusa issue. I feel like someone should claim that prize. Perhaps @photon_noir would like to claim that bounty? Seems fair to me.
To our friends, have you tried either LLE extraction of your butane with water, or filtering your liquid butane through 10A molecular sieve and activated alumina?? @johnbigoilco @Coldknock @Dukejohnson @Dred_pirate @dr_terpene @Jmoreno0507
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I was playing with butane in my sub 60f booth today and yesterday and had zero rapid crash or any anxiety bars forming overnight.
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Amines cause acids to precipitate, like Sulphur, or thc-a…
One could add this butane to a decarbed solution and nothing would happen, but with an acidic compound you get a reaction… you can pour a jar out of the honeypot and let the butane evaporate and you get terps and sugar thc-a, within an hour all thc-a is crystals…
It’s most definitely the one thing refineries use to crash out an undesirable compound, and that is amines.
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