By those temps I mean -75c is what we run through the jacket of the material column, switching that to any type of heat would be an enormous task… if we just cool the material column with ice water or dry ice the material would be full of lipids without a separate dewax chamber… I’ll do a run tonight with the material in the column for a few hours before the run, we’ll weigh the solvent tank when empty and when recovered to get an accurate of what’s left in our material column. Our concern is if we heat our material column as we would the collection chamber and our material isn’t dewaxed we’ll be left with a bunch of fats and lipids in our material column as well…
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Right, but if you’re heating it, then you must recool it after all the gas has been recovered, and that takes time following the run prior to reinjecting for the next run, no?
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Its all about balance and individual ideals and circumstances. Many like to heat and recover as much as possible, others dont, Its all good to me.
The main thing is this topic of discussion is “how to get cold butane completely out of material column” If the topic was debating about it at all then it depends, but if one is interested in the topic then the answer is heat.
The fats and waxes will be left in your material column, exactly where they started. Some times there is enough residual solvent to run down to the bottom valve / manifold area and can be laden with waxy oil, this can be mitigated or avoided. One way would be to have two collections, one for the cold run and the other after for a warm b grade run.
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Also if you are using cones keep them empty so any gas that pools isnt soaking tour material. If you hook up a manifold you could hot gas push and as soon as you see the liquid stop rurn the valve and start collecting the warm gas outta the top. Should heat your column up too much to not be able to re chill before next run
Seems the easy way around this would be my hillbilly box method. I dont use my dewax column anymore. I fill material column, vacummn it down, then disconnect from rack and cover in dry ice. Hour later take out and run. About 30 min in itll slowly warm up. Its 38 degrees in mi average lately. Just keep cloing valve until ya build 5 to 10 lb pressure and blast until no more liquid. Getting 10 out of 11 lb back this way. And running cold. Best of both worlds
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Here are some thoughts to consider:
Also check out the subzero pneumatic circulation system at:
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…He’s spoken
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It’d be interesting to see someone build a manifold/ separate reservoir specifically for heating the column in the jacket. Once you’re done chilling the column someone can close off the chiller and have an already-heated-solution ready to flow through the jacket and start warming it up to recover
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My question is, if only use vacuum and no heat how good of a recovery would you get from the biomass?
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not nearly as much as you’d like.
heat is necessary for any valuable recovery.
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Terrible recovery with just vacuim it will have an evaporative cooling effect. I had really good success freezing a non jacketed column in a dry ice bunker, it thaws out after you flush solvent through it rather than staying cold with a sleeved column. It seems like live resin material may hold onto butane less due to the water content.
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That’s what I was thinking… if I wanted to run glycol through my jackets overnight, what system or protocol is there to evacuate the glycol and run hot water. This had been the struggle for me. Figuring out how to run both glycol and hot water
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Could you run hot glycol instead of hot water?
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use more heat exchangers and keep them separate.
*edit or heat the glycol water with an appropriate heater
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Its always easier to recover propane out of the column than it is butane 
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thank you Sir!!
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I could have sworn @GrayWolf posted a design that uses a air pressure to push/evacuation the glycol to a reservoir, then switches to hot water, I cant find it so maybe im out to lunch
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It’s all about vapor pressure. At -40C I need a super low vacuum to evaporate butane. At room temp that value of vacuum is much less.
In theory it could work but you need a fast and deep vac.
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Yes! I have been thinking about this lately as well
Even at room temp it’s going to be a slog because in order to evaporate, it’s going to suck temperature and make the column cold. You know, Heat of Vaporization and whatnot. Unless there is some sort of HEX or heater keeping the fluid warm, it’s just going to cool everything down and slow to a crawl.
At my last lab, we were running a very large system (12" diameter material columns) and even with a heated jacket, that heat couldn’t penetrate to the center of our material baskets and we always had a frozen core of biomass after runs. This was even after applying hot fluid to the material column for ~2hrs during recovery.
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