Has anyone used capna ares falling film?

I was curious if anyone has used the ARES falling film by CAPNA. If so did you like it? Does it operate like advertised? I could not find any mention of it on here.
Thank You.

If you search Capna, you will see a trend…

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I have noticed. Most things are about the ethos which I have looked at and wasn’t impressed. The lab I’m working with has the ares and I was curious about any first hand exp. It’s what we have now so it is what it is. I have been looking at bizzybee for future upgrades. I was just curious about specific comparisons if anyone has one.

@anon6488101 has one :point_up: I believe I was told it was slow

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I don’t have any first hand experience with their stuff, because with my background I could see exactly what they were doing and wouldn’t pay a premium for a prepackaged version of something I could build. It seems they have good ideas, but have not engineered the efficiency to where it should be. My 2¢ having never used one. :man_shrugging:

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Don’t get @outlander started on this one! He could talk all day about capna engineering/efficiency issues.

And it’s true, it’s like super obvious things that they missed on their equipment that end up making life miserable unless you fix it yourself.

We have an ethos-6, Ares falling film, and a Ceres centrifuge.

The ethos is cool mostly because it has the cooling chamber in it. Otherwise, it’s just a user friendly extraction system.

The Ceres is just the embodiment of the face-palm emoji :woman_facepalming:t4: - I can’t.

The Ares isn’t as much of a nightmare, it does its job but as is, running anything over 1L/min is pushing it. Tyler (outlander) has made some improvements to the unit to help it run faster, but in reality we all wish we could just get rid of it and start from scratch.

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With regard to it operating “as advertised”, I’m curious if using hemp makes a difference. In other words, the parameters advertised are for cannabis - does running hemp instead change anything?

We’ve only ever used hemp, so it’s possible others running cannabis won’t experience the same issues. Just a thought

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Only experience I have is with a Colorado Extraction Systems Spray Vap and I modified it by adding a dosing pump and valves to use continuesly as to not have to break vacuum to empty the system, I’m happy with it :grin:

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Problem is Capna doesn’t really know what they are doing. They just put shit together without asking if there is a better way. For example, their official recommendation is to pick up and pour at 15 gallon stainless tank filled with ethanol. This is dumb. The Ares itself is mostly what capna advertised but without modifications you can run your boiler out of steam. Sometime between 2018 and 2019 they halved the length of their condensing columns for one or two possible reasons. 1. Greed with SS tariffs 2. They already had insufficient heating capacity so why have extra cooling? So now it blows ethanol vapor into the room. Here is the fun part: the Ares is not rated for C1D1 or C1D2 environments. Again official recommendation is to duct the ethanol vapor elsewhere.

To their credit (believe it or not they deserve it), when something breaks it is always overnighted at no cost to the customer.

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I used one for about 6 months. I spent more time repairing the boiler and removing metal shavings from the evaporating column than actually running the unit. Unfortunately, do not advise purchasing. Had operating and engineering issues using their ethanol extraction/centrifuge system, as well. Got the job done, painfully…but they’re in need of a revamp imo.

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Sounds like you got V1.

I also have heard wonders of their customer service / on call solutions.

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