Guidance and thoughts on Chinese equipment...

Well…I am obviously a newbie. I am a greenhouse hemp grower on the hunt for entry level equipment to do ethanol extraction and get the best value from my crop. I only want to do small batches up to 50lbs/week. Ideally I wouldn’t bother with it more than two or three of those days. Of course, my goal is to output a nice golden distillate. I am thinking a jacketed reactor of some sort plus chiller, filtration, rotovap and vacuum oven. My budget is maybe 40k max. I want to do it right, but don’t want to overpay either (cheap ass farmer).
So questions of the day…

  1. Simplest path to golden distillate? Thought is to go cold ethanol to avoid the chlorophyll.
  2. How to best filter before going to the rotovap?
  3. Will I need the oven post rotovap if I am selling the distillate raw?
  4. Here is the loaded question. I am seeing some interesting products over on Alibaba. I have bought equipment on there before, so understand the risk. I am more interested in your thoughts on the design of some of this equipment. They do process substantially more hemp than we do…
    a) there are several larger units that could be used as a reactor and centrifuge…no jacket for chilling though This product is no longer available.
    b) another…
    This product is no longer available.
    c) what the?
    This product is no longer available.
    d) any idea how the two reactors work on this one?
    This product is no longer available.
    e) this looks safe, but I how to best get the ethanol out of the remaining material? Can I heat up the material in the reactor and condense the ethanol out?
    This product is no longer available.

Any and all guidance and/or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Have you checked out the white-paper @Photon_noir and I put together?

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I have! That helped a lot. I also applied for the beta of your ACE spinner via website. If you think I am someone you would be able to assist, please message me. I would love to learn more about your services. I am an engineer and my wife is a chemist, so we shouldn’t require too much hand holding once we got things going :+1:

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If you are in the US and importing Chinese equipment, just remember to set aside like 25-30% of the invoice price. You will need to pay that to customs once your goods land on US soil. Also each day that you delay this payment they will bill you $xxx for storage. Dont be surprised if the Chinese company asks you for you business info (EIN or SSN).

Interesting, I just received my 2l short path, 5l rotovap and two chillers/vacuum pumps end of October from China and didn’t have to pay customs any fees. This was around the same total too, about $7k.

Is this something that just started happening in the last month with trumps new tariffs?

I’ll take a closer look at that equipment when I’ve got a keyboard & real screan.

First couple look appropriate. Second looks like the starting point for the Ace-30

Anyone see or used one of these guys for extraction?

They say they now have an add-on for cold ethanol extraction as well as a french press…wonder if that could be used for recovery from the biomass? I am going to call them for more info.

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Good chance they are declaring less than 800 value at customs to bypass taxes lol

Any info??

They are a solid company. My boss just got out extraction lab set up through them. We got the E140 extractor. Super easy to use and looks cooler than our other extractors. It pumps out crude like no ones business. The draindroyd gets our stuff dewaxed in no time. I think they just put up a live tour of their facility on YouTube not to long ago.