Heptane Extracts

Unless any big break throughs happen in the EHO remediation thread, it looks like hydrocarbons are pushing boundaries alone. It seems like the adsorptive properties are much more effective in hydrocarbons.

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Yea thats true, but hydrocarbons have always been the best option in my opinion. Ive always just dewaxed in hydrocarbon instead of winterizing in ethanol or methanol and now that carbon chemistry has the degumming clay product I suspect its going to make dewaxing in butane/isobutane even more effective.

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Why not both?

Both hydrocarbons and alcohols for wax removal your saying?

Yes. Not simultaneously, of course.

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My reasoning is if i can remove a significant portion of the waxes and not have to waste the time and energy required to remove alcohol from the extract, and I end up with better terpene preservation i’d rsther do that.

That being said any of the basic alcohols are more effective than any basic alkanes at removing waxes and if your making crude for distillate then you should be using alcohol to remove fats since they just cause a bigger headache when they’re in the still.

Its a point thats made on this site quite often, the best solution for you depends on your desired end product.

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A colleague of mine, says he soaks his biomass in Heptane for 12hrs because when doing a standard soak time of 20-40mins he only captures 30% of the cannabanoids. The chemist in me thinks that is way to long and that he is pulling alot of undesirables.

What are the community’s thoughts on this ?

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Cant remember where i read it…but an experiment was done where they left biomass in heptane for 3 days without pulling green.

You can warm up the heptane to increase solubility and shrink run time.

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I believe that to be true as the chlorophyll would stay bonded to the water (polar). My question is more about the capture of the cannabanoids. We will be running large scale extraction over 100,000 pounds. I want to use Heptane to skip the drying process but hearing that 12hr soak really creates a bottleneck.

I have some biomass and some heptane and I could run a bench test but was wondering if anyone here could confirm or deny the Heptane required a 12hr soak to be effective from extracting the active compounds (THC/CBD etc)

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Ive soaked biomass in heptane for days/week with no chlorophyll, and just got orange color. I havent removed solvent yet, but imagine its gonna come out dark dark, and inspection of the biomass revealed a large portion of the trichome heads were not present post soak (but large portion of stalks were still present). Flower was dry, xtraction was performed via shake, set and forget at 85F. I need to get off my ass and vap this jar down and send to lab down street, and prepare replicate samples. This thread is motivating.

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If its suspended in solvent now would be a good time to scrub it. Passing through our T41, T5, Alumina, MagSilPR, etc can help. Degumming might make follow on purification easier too.
@CollectiveObjective

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I find orange hues are pulled very effectively by t-5 in other solvent systems.

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Bho crc teck should crossover

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I’ll find out if that’s true with pentane next week. Just concerned with what temp to do so at this point.

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I don’t know much about each solvent off the top of my head, but at whatever temperature keeps it a liquid and effectively renders its water pickup as low as possible.

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I’m looking into heptane or pentane to improve my extraction, is it safe to use (I do have a well ventilated area) with a pan vacuum chamber to evap? 1 liter of heptane PA (99.5%) Costs me 10$ here.

Currently I extract on ethanol, but the end product is probably what you consider crude, I wanted to get the black oil and redissolve in heptane.

Would anyone recommend a sop to do so?

In terms of equipment, I have clays, büchner, ac, mah stirrer and a guetto vacumm chamber (making one out of a pot)

Ps: I don’t have access to equipment where I live ($$$$$) , natural resources, chemicals, etc are cheap, go figure.

I have crude ready to test and report back next week, to give it back to the community :slight_smile:

If heptane just has a problem with fats, why not make the initial extract and then chill it, and precipitate those fats by adding another solvent, which is miscible with heptane, but which precipitates the fats out? I can think of some obvious answers, and I bet you can too :wink:

Edit: “dual solvent recrsytalisation” is basically the technique in question

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Theres one method in particular I’ve been meaning to try up that alley…sure is nice to have concepts seconded on this board. @Lewis_Bronsted

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Heptane and hhydrocarbons in general make most sop for cleaning up crude even better so Yes go 4 it

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Thats what i mean al along that is key
You can even sonicate the extraction and by LLE leave most gunk behind👍

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