No, I understood that you were using it as 2 different processes. I think it’s a cool idea
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Thanks! Yeh I agree -20c only does so much. Going colder would be totally feasible, but I just use a little carbon and t5 to help at the end.
The sintered discs on the CO2 columns are surprisingly effective at filtering a lot of bs even at -20 though. I see very little lipid in the extraction solution. Some pigments do get stripped, but the t5 and carbon help pick up the slack. For this process I kinda like sticking to the -20 ish range just because it doesn’t require super expensive chillers, specialized lines ect.
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Custom tooling? I am curious?
How do you remove the residual EtOH from Biomass?
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this is a fuckin cool idea. if you’re running a terpene strip beforehand and then running your cold/cryo etoh, you’ve necessarily gotta decompress your vessels before the etoh step right? depending on what its costing you to chill your ethanol, have you considered evacuating your columns through a coil in your etoh vessel and taking advantage of whatever chilling you can get from that gas expansion? Idk what kind of machine you’re running, but my best results pulling CO2 terps have involved dropping pressure in collection below my pumps minimum inlet pressure, so I’m just venting the gas post collection. if you’re doing something similar then depending on the duration of your light fraction strip you could probably get some decent chilling out of your exhaust line too.
Yup… Had to build a custom wrench to open the fucking hammer unions on the columns. Apeks gives you a rubber dead blow mallet to bang on their 150k machine as their solution 
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Yup we do that basically. The columns are cold before we start running etoh due to the collection of the CO2. works pretty nicely.
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Co2 back pressure for a final purge then I just rack it up and throw it in a fume hood for 24 hours. its completely dry after that.
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I absolutely love your creativity there! You could potentially recover the last of the EtOH with a quick CO2 run? I am actually in a similar situation with regards to improving our facilities CO2 efficiency!
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I used to use 4 5 gallon buckets and made as much RSO as my CO2 extractor made each day.
What I did was take one bucket and drilled a bunch of holes in it, then I would take the bucket with holes in it and put it in a normal bucket. Then I would put biomass into the bucket and fill it like 2/3 full. Then I would fill up the 2 bucket system with ethanol until the solvent level was at the level of the biomass. Sometimes I would stir it a little bit, but usually I just let it soak at RT for an hour, then I harvested the ethanol and filtered it quickly using coffee filters and silk screens. Sometimes I would suck it right up into the rotovap with my filter and silk screen on the intake hose. I was impressed at how much I was able to make. Each bucket system was able to get me 12-20+% yield, potency was 60-70+% cannabinoids, and I could extract about 0.5 kg of biomass per bucket.
I was pretty impressed at how a trip to walmart and less than 20 bucks got me 2 extraction units. The RSO turned out very dark, but it was really potent and people bought it regularly for meds.
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If you don’t clean your accumulator, and do lots of cleaning runs with lots of ethanol, you can achieve this.
What do you do with all of the ethanol soaked biomass after the extraction?
Wouldn’t it be wiser to run CXE where you only need 10% of the ethanol and you can fully rinse the ethanol out of the biomass before opening the extraction vessel.
With CXE you can also use inline winterzation with cryogenic cooling from the r744 expansion.
Ethanol extraction is quick but recovery and solvent volumes are problematic, CXE solves both these issues.
Get a fuge and a membrane skid. Not quite in-line (yet) but it’s close. Winterization and solvent removal are much more cost efficient going this route.
As for what to do with the wet biomass, that depends on where you are locally. In my area, there’s two different companies that will drop a 3 unit box and pick it up for practically pennies. Even heptane denatured they didn’t bat an eye at. If one looks hard enough, there are always options.
I call bullshit again. Take the time to build a system that suits your needs. If you do it right you can make a system that’s able to give you a puddle of concentrate and a high recovery rate, Like 98%
As long as you match the heating and cooling capacities you’re golden, lol no pun intended.
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Fuge it until you can’t get anymore out. Dry it out for a week, then compost it.
I used to compost all my used material in the summer in my garden. 
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That’s alot of coin going down the drain… how long will local regulators allow for the VOC’s escape from such a process.
Even the best centrifuge can leave a sizable volume of solvent behind, if your leaving solvent behing then most likely your leaving cannabinoids behind also…
Are you worried about employee solvent exposure? I would imagine that OSHA would have a thing or two to say about solvent exposure limits and VOC emissions.
racks in a fume hood. Takes 1 night to completely purge the days run.
Fill me in on what CXE stands for. Not familiar with that acronym
Carbon Dioxide Expanded extractions
Basically a traditional solvent dissolved in liquid Co2 much like a detergent is dissolved in water to increase its loading capacity.
Most studies you will find only focus on supercritical Co2 with solvents my work is exclusively with Liquid Co2 and solvents combined.
Andy from Apeks like my application soo much he borrowed it from me but like everything Andy does he screwed up the details and it works half-ass.
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