HTE purging

We’ve been finding that fter crashing THCA out of our extracts, the HTE is much harder to purge free of solvents than a normal live resin run would be.

Can anyone share their favorite techniques and temps? We’re spending a lot of extra money on testing because of this issue. Thanks so much.

Hot water bath in a pyrex pan using an immersion heater. Sick jar in hot water and the HTE will begin to boil. Do this a few times until the intensity of the boiling isn’t as great and then stick it in a vac oven for a bit at your normal temps. If this isn’t good enough you can pour it into a pyrex pan and do the same steps but you’re gonna lose some HTE doing this.

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Will this purge method also work with HTE made from EtOH?

Never tried

Why separate the HTE from the crystals? Why not just purge everything all together?

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For one you can make a thinner layer seperate.
Second if you want to know your yeild of each they have to be seperate.

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in my experience, crystals are pretty resilient. I hit them with a ton of heat and full vac right away. The HTE part I hit at room temp and start at -15 and raise the vac by like 5 each day for 2-3 days. I rarely ever hit full vac on the HTE part.

I don’t get my stuff tested, so your results may vary for residuals. Since terps are hydrocarbons it takes a bit more finesse to purge the butane fully, it kind of wants to stay there.

Low and slow works for me… I tried fast and warm and it just made it taste off and ended up muffining too much and spilling over the container.

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Thanks for the feedback. I’m working with Ethanol, but trying to apply hydrocarbon techniques to achieve the same/similar result. I’m getting good separation lately. Is your HTE separted into a jar or spread thin on pyrex? If it’s in a jar how thick of a layer is it?

I’m debating on whether it’s worth it to pour off the HTE or just purge all together. I dont get much HTE, but there is certainly pools of juice on top of the crystals, but generally as i increase temp, the pools dissaeaper and basically turn crystalline.

i usually pour it into smaller gram sized jars, fill them like half full to account for any muffining that happens. There’s usually like 1/4" to 1/2" of thickness in the jar

I have purged them all together before, it does the same thing you stated, kinda all gels up and turns to sugar. When I’m lazy or don’t have any clean jars I just purge it all together at room temp with lower vac like it was straight HTE.

I unfortunately don’t have any experience with ethanol to help in that regard

Interesting though how you said, if you don’t separate them it it sugars up. So maybe it’s worth it to separate them and recombine after.

What are you packaging your crystals coated in terps in? I find that the saucy stuff tends to get in the threads of the small gram sized jars. Any suggestions?

Ive never heard of someone keeping a consistent vac level of -15" hg, ive heard of folks doing this to reach a certain consistency after the purge.

How and why are you doing this?

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yeah this is something I’ve noticed too, not sure why it sugars more when not separated, I’m guessing the crystals in there are acting as seeds and attracting the remaining THCA in the HTE part causing them to crash out faster. My HTE will sugar up over time, but it takes a good month or more before it starts to happen.

I use these little jars for storing it all once it’s done
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072THBHS6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

They have what looks like a piece of wax coated paper in the lid that helps anything from getting to the threads. I haven’t really tested it out though as it just sits on my desk once it’s been put in the jar. My stuffs all personal so it doesn’t see much movement

to prevent muffining, it’s a slower more gradual purge. First time I tried purging this stuff it expanded like crazy and just went everywhere. Ramping the vac slowly over a few days prevents that and the HTE pool stays a liquid and just slowly bubbles as the remaining tane is released. By the end of it I’m nearing full vac… I usually only take the HTE to -25 and hold it there until there’s no more reaction for a while.

Day 1: -15
Day 2: -20
Day 3: -25

sometimes it takes longer because by day 2 it will muffin too much for my liking at -20, but that’s the general process I use

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Sorry I wasnt clear, im asking how you are keeping your vac levels as low as -15 during the purging process. Because as the solvent evaporates its going to affwct your vac levels.

Also did you mean that your terp fraction muffins up? My terp fractions are always far too runny for any kind of muffin to be able to occur at any vac depth. Are you sure youre crystallizing everything you can from your mother liquor or were you referring to purging the crystals?

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My goal is to make achieving a certain waxy consistency a bit easier. A vac controller would work but I dont want to buy one which is why im asking how u dunnit.

I just run the pump until it hits -15 then let it hold, and come back and top it off every hour as it lessens. It doesn’t stay at a constant -15 with the fluctuations, but I try to pay attention to it and keep it as close as possible.

And yeah, it muffins because of waxes and additional THCA in there. I only crash like half of the THCA out by preference. I like the HTE to contain close to a flower % of THC in there, with tons of terps. It’s really enjoyable to dab that. My girl likes the crystals so she dabs those by themselves. I don’t have much use for straight terps so I don’t let them separate too long.

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What’s your tech for finishing the precipitation of THCa from your diamonds and your tech for final purge of the HTE?

The HTE that I most recently poured off from the crystals is beginning to precipitate micro crystals…is it worth filtering the micro crystals out? If i continue to purge is it just going to completely solidify into budder?

It’ll only “ solidify” if it’s full of fats and lipids. You may have more precipitation of thca but it shouldn’t thicken unless you didn’t dewax or extract cold enough.

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This depends on how much of the starting product was made up of terpenes to begin with and whether or not your starting product was thoroughly dewaxed.

With waxes in your product, as you preciptate thca from the solution the percentage of waxes in the solution will increase. In this instance you will end up with a consistency close to budder if you allow your solvent to totally evaporate.

I dont usually have this problem, my terp fraction usually gets to a point after crystallization where its so runny that it becomes pretty easy for me to separate crystals by just allowing them to settle as best they can to the bottom of the container and decanting as much of the terp fraction as possible. Theres always some terp left with my crystals so I follow this up by dissolving the THCa rich fraction back into heptane and recrystallize.

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Hey @ScoobyDoobie, do you still recrystalize in Heptane or have you moved to pentane now ?

Cheers