I am curious what people might be doing to increase their efficiencies? I’m talking about cannabinoid yields based off of COA’s from the input biomass not just by weight. I have tried longer soak times and different blends of solvent, doesn’t seem to change it to drastically. and I don’t want to warm up the injection temp at all I’m only at -60c. I’m filtering with CRX so its not too hard of a scrubbing. Looks like my last lot yield was at 30% of total cannabinoids. I have told my partners that I don’t think there’s much else I can do while keeping the quality of the product where we like it to be. any input would be appreciated
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Using bud? How is your biomass prep? What’s the volume on your material column and how much are you loading them with on average?
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You need to test your spent biomass for leftover thc and that will tell you a lot more.
Longer soaks aren’t going to help if your solvent is fully saturated. Second soaks or a flush is going to tell you a lot, on your next run that you feel is leaving to much behind you should just do another soak with the same extracted biomass and see how much more you can pull. I’d wager that you’ll get a bit more extracted.
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I typically do a soak then a rinse but I’ll try 2 soaks on this next round forsure
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What gas ratio are you using?
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Using fresh frozen whole plant outdoor, in 36x8inch socks bout 7500g per sock with a few inches of room at the top
Usually around 60/40 butane/propane
I mean how many lbs of gas for every lb of biomass.
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Around 100lbs over 30kg
60lb run with 100lbs of gas? I would run 70/30 8:1 or 10:1 no soak.
10 lbs of biomass to 100lbs of gas, just flood your material column and keep it moving. You will get 95+% of your TAC
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I don’t think I have room in my recovery pot for that haha I run a x40 from precision, 100lbs gets it probably 2/3rds full and 100 lbs drops my full solvent tank down to the dip tube. I could dump recover and redump tho
I will forsure try this
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You can get a few recovery vessels and setup a modular system so you can just fill recovery and roll it over to a heater bank to do work while you fill another recovery vessel
Damn that would be awesome! I run a licences processing facility in Canada, the rules are over the top haha My QA says the entire lot has to be one homogeneous solution before it goes to post processing, it really holds my back from doing huge lots.
I too run an X40
I got an 87% efficiency on thca to big diamonds in my last trim run that started out about 10% thca
Higher potency I tend to get better efficiency
Getting the last few % is a pain in the ass regardless of if it starts at 20% or 10%
30% efficiency is extremely low
For one stop running all 4 columns. X40 solvent tank is far to small to run all 4 columns
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To see if it’s the solvent ratio, run a smaller tube with material your familiar with. Use a 4x36 and run the 8 or 10:1 or more.
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I totally glanced over the fresh frozen part… 5:1 or 8:1 should work which is atleast less gas
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Doesn’t help that I was running very low thcA outdoor then haha I think it tested at only like 4%
I will forsure be trying to run only 2 columns on Wednesday thank you for the tip! My next purchase was already going to be another/bigger solvent tank so you just sealed the deal haha
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Not familiar with your system specifics but throttling down your flow rate on the final flush will increase contact time. This is a variable to consider, especially while waiting on more solvent holding capacity.
Not going to bring up temp here since you stated you do not want to do that as you are only at -60C.
As mentioned above - Test the post extracted bio before anything else if you can. Critical point especially as you begin to start to optimize the process and are trying to see the effect of changes made.
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There are a LOT of qualified QA types looking for work.
If you’ve got the power to do so, it might be worth exploring some of the resumes out there.
So long as you keep accurate records, you can split your batches internally however you want. You may need to do more testing if you don’t re-batch everything at a later stage, but otherwise there’s nothing wrong with doing multiple pulls/stages.
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