Hey guys. So my biggest question before I start the bucket tek is this: how many times can I use the ethanol tincture to keep soaking trim? As in, let’s say I have 40lbs to run through. Could I just keep doing bucket tek method to these 40 over and over again and then be left with say roughly 5 gallons of very potent tincture (Maybe 2 liters of crude in said tincture)? Will you lose a lot of etoh this way? Or is it the more potent the tincture becomes, the less power it has to strip cannabinoids?
you can rewash up to 2x, any more and youll hit the point of diminishing returns really fast, especially since some of the etoh will never leave the biomass. You’d run out of etoh before you hit 40 lbs of biomass with 5 gal of solvent without distilling to recover the etoh in between 10 lb runs.
Ethanol will become saturated and will be unable to pull more. If you are using a roto and recycling the etoh, that recycled etoh can pull more. If you don’t care about filtering anything and plan on taking it raw you could use warm etoh.
5 gallons will be too little for 40 lbs. One wash might be 40 gallons, depending on the material and how many washes you plan on doing.
You will lose etoh to the material at the end of the run and a little through evaporation between runs if it isn’t closed loop.
2 liters of crude for 4 liters of wash is unrealistically high as well.
Ok good to know. From what I read on bucket tek sop, he says repeat the steps (pouring etoh over trim and adding more fresh etoh to fully saturate) until you’re through all the biomass. So i wasn’t sure, like could you just keep going and going, adding fresh etoh each time until you’re through the biomass? I’m only going to wash the biomass two times, but basically what I was trying to do is get as much etoh THC tincture done as possible before our roto gets here (2 weeks ish) so that when it comes can spend a few solid days evaporating it all.
you can definitely get more than 1lb of cannabis extracted with a gal of ethanol. if you’ve got a centrifuge, you can perhaps get 5 or even 10lb extracted. you won’t have a full gal of ethanol when you’re done, and you definitely won’t have gotten ALL the cannabinoids.
whether or not this approach is viable in your situation is about balancing the cost of solvent recovery and the leaving behind of cannabinoids. In House analytics make it much easier to figure out where the sweet spot is for your opperation.
THIS is exactly what I needed to know. And yeah we have a panda model “centrifuge” so will just have to do some calculations on the returns. I’m assuming as the tincture becomes more potent with cannabinoids it becomes less effective at stripping the cannabinoids from biomass?
Yes. The more saturated the ethanol is with cannabinoids, the less effective it becomes at stripping cannabinoids from fresh biomass.
Somebody on this thread mentioned they use an ethanol saturation point of 75 mg cannabinoids/mL ethanol. So if you know the potency of your cannabis pre-extraction, you can do some math to see how often you are able to reuse the solvent before reaching 75 mg/mL. Hope that helps
sub -40C or below cold temps will not hold as much cannabinoids. ive read but havent seen analytics ( apparently ecodyst has) that room temp ethanol can hold up to 10 times more cannabinoids at its saturation point than cold etoh can.
I have been putting 45# through 15gal. its hemp, 9% and the biomass is cheap compared to MJ- not seen any issue at all with yeilds. every 10# or so I lose nearly a gallon so I keep topping it until the last 10# are going in.
Yes also I am warm extracting this batch as well because it has trace cadmium and so long as I have to use AC and T5 to clear the stuff out why would I go to the trouble of doing cryo?
I’d figure the additional undesirables extracted would overwork your filter cakes and keep you from achieving a nice pale yellow solution when running warm. Have you been getting good color in your crude solution running warm after filtration?
I’m not sure if ur referring to my post, but I want to say that I think its 75mg/ml at -70C(or lower) temperatures, its probably closer to 200mg/ml at room temp and up into the 300mg/ml when u get it hot.
I guesstimate with this thc content categories.
0-5% fan leaf trim shit
5-10% outdoor/machine trimmed
10-15% outdoor bud bulk, or indoor sugar leaf trim
10-25% indoor bud
30-40% tumble kief
40-70% crude
For my small scale workflow it’s just been so much easier to extract at room temp and then filter and winterize properly after. But I certainly want to give room temp hexane and room temp methanol winterization a go soon
so will just have to do some calculations on the returns. I’m assuming as the tincture becomes more potent with cannabinoids it becomes less effective at stripping the cannabinoids from biomass?