I have been running the hot condenser tek with varied success. The issue we are encountering is that by running the condenser over 120C, we get some vapor blowing past the collection flask and into the cold trap, so we turn the temp back down to 115-120. Has anyone else experienced this? Are people using a second drop down flask after the first one to catch any fly-by vapors?
Here is a photo of our setup, the flask under the dry ice cold trap is where I collect heads. It goes from there into a mechanical cold trap for any vapors that don’t collect. I’d love to be able to run this at 150C condenser for faster flow and better quality product!
Second allihn condenser set to 80c for two reasons-
It catches any blow over
And the cold trap itself is way to close to your receiving flask- it’s creating a sharp pressure drop that pushes back on your head and slows/stops distillation
Once you hit mains you should be dropping your head condenser temp quite a bit btw like 80-100c
Run it hot during heads to blow through them as fast as possible, then drop temp when main body is coming over is how I’ve been running and it’s working well- I believe that’s in the orig @anon42519203 SOp
Interesting… I’ll give it a try on our next pass. Flow rate has been great at 120C on the condenser. I was trying to go hotter because the GLG SOP says to set the head temp to 150C, and the columbolabs sop says to set it to within 20C of the head vapor temp when you get to mains.
I also think that 1 coldtrap is very little on the size of rig ?
Might be wrong but looks like a fairly large
Also on first passes some dry ice around the flask of the coldtrap ?
I run at least 2 cold traps for 1st pass and run the condenser at 155-159c give or take. My cold trap setup is a lil different than the way breaking dabs has his set up but it works awesome for me.
@Concentrated_humbold would you mind sharing a pic of your rig? I’m thinking I need to add a second condenser and swing down flask to catch flybys in the body.
@Roguelab I usually use 2 cold traps, but this cold trap is connected to a mechanical cold trap which does an amazing job protecting the pump. This is a 10L system and I kept it around 30 microns the whole run!
Its on here some where, or next time i run a first pass i will. Its basically a 5l flask vertical with another T and 250-500ml flask behind that then a lieberg cooled with just ice water then that goes into a 2l flask submerged in dry ice with 1” vacum line coming out the other opening and then into a stainless steel cold trap with a -90 immersion chiller and the cold trap in a bucket with dry ice packed around it
I also like to keep the condenser pretty hot throughout main body. Usually stays in the 150 range but it’ll drop to 140 after a liter or so of collected distillate. It sure does seem to help with any lingering odors. You’ll certainly collect some THC in your “heads” flask, but I’ll just pour off the top after the run and stack the heads for further processing, so I’m ok with it.
This is a big problem with this tek, we solved using a stainless steel cold trap as a secondary cold trap after a glass one, since a lot of stuff tends to stay vapor and pass through.
I think for my next run on Monday, im just gonna run the condenser cooler during main body like @Rowan suggested, then order a condenser and an additional T to run real hot condenser tek.
the lieberg is just the cool down the terps bwfore tbey hit the cold traps and all the nasties stay in the 2l flask keeping my stainless that is -90 clean od everything but a few mls
