How to clean a collection pot

I just did my first run. Pretty sure I over purged?..The oil was super think. I had to scrap it out. But now Im not sure how to clean the pot. Any suggestions?

What is recommended for a scrapper?

Warm up some iso and swish it around in there.

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We clean our extractors with room temp ethanol after every run

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If its supper nar we use granulated salt with warm ethanol for the hard places you cant put your hand like boiling flask.

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ill sometimes not watch the purge as close as i should and overpurge. what i end up doing is just blasting some butane back in until i get the consistency ii need to be able to transfer the majority out of the collection pot without scraping.

as for cleaning walmart has 18 packs of washcloths for $3 and quarts of iso for $2.50 i find myself filling carts with these items far too often.

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Is there a reason you can’t use acetone? It’s cheaper, and way more aggressive at cleaning.

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I only use acetone around distillation. I keep acetone away from hydrocarbon extraction for the fear of it contaminating my slabs

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I wonder if I’m missing something, is the danger of contamination not the same with isopropanol as it is with acetone? I would normally assume that because tech grade acetone dries so quickly a clean that you would be less worried about residuals with it over iso.

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We do a clean in place procedure. Filters are removed from the column first, then the system is sealed and evacuated. An evacucated honey pot or “suckerpot” is connected to the collection spool via bottom drain port. The system is then cycled to blast/dissolve all the contaminates down to the collection pot. The solvent is then recovered, and the platter removed. The platter can be washed with solvents, alconox, and rinsed with RO water. After air drying The gasket can be cleaned and the platter re-installed.
This procedure is quick, I like to use it in between different strains to keep everything tasting different.

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Don’t use paper towels, get Class 100 Cleanroom Wipes with 99% Iso (or the highest concentration you can get). Paper towels leave fine strands behind and overtime this WILL clog ultra-low tolerance equipment like distillation, gear pumps, vacuum pumps…

Review compatibility of any solvents with Buna-N/Viton/PTFE/whatever gasket material you’re using. Most are fine in Isopropyl but avoid scraping against them too much.

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Kimtech wipes, followed by lint free cloth, washed with ethanol a few times until residue is gone, and wiped till dry. Finally, pull vac on system and you should remove any vapors and the majority of the ethanol. If you have any left, it’s less than 50 ppm. I hardly have any left in my final product, it’s negligible.

If it was a decent concentrate to begin with. Scrape the last that you can and whip it up. Plop it in your oven (roughly 115f-ish) after whipping enough for a nice crumble cookie. That’s desirable, too

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sugar water

We use acetone for all our stainless specifically because it is a far more aggressive solvent than iso, has a lower boiling point, and evaporates much faster. I’m not sure why anyone would want to use iso unless it was for cleaning plastics or synthetic rubbers which acetone would destroy much more quickly.

We have a Swissmex brand acetone pump sprayer that we use to sanitize our big pressure vessels. That shit works like a charm and allows us to sanitize even large vessels in a couple minutes flat with very little effort, even big vessels with small openings which make it hard to access the entirety of the inside by simply wiping it out.

If you’re worried about the solvents lingering, give it a big ole’ blast with an air compressor and that’ll clear out any remaining fumes from the vessel pretty fast.

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acetone is by far the best cleaner for labware and stainless

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I’m lucky enough to be able to just throw them on a heated stir plate set about 45C, add ethanol, drop in stir bar, walk away for a while. Doesn’t work on every hotplate, but there’s an old Chinese monster that’ll spin through the vessel. Little polish with a silicon spatula, return solvent to container, wipe w/ clear iso.
We use eth because all of that gets winterized and roto’d down for crude, and TPTB want to stick to ethanol.

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