I didn’t pull sulphur with ethanol until I was also pulling water.
When I added water to my biomass, to aide in distilling off the last 10% or so of my solvent, I got blue ethanol both times. So I stopped trying to get my solvent back that way. I initially thought the sulphur was coming from sulphur containing amino acids in the biomass, but after reading others reports of sulphur in their BHO, I’m more inclined to blame my grow team. I should probably confirm.
Regarding your statement that the water:EtOH azeo is useful for all steps of the cannabis resin solvent application, is there any method of saline or acid washes without first adding a nonpolar / hydrocarbon solvent?
If anyone has a good link for reasonably priced high quality liters of pentane & heptane, please show the link, I see it discussed but looking to buy right now. Lab society took down the pentane.
Let me also suggest an alternative to saline in these washes though it is off topic so I will keep it short. I plan a detailed photo post soon. Disolve your compound in hexane. I use a 100 ml sep funnel so I disolve whatever I got in 50 ml hexane. I am always an ounce or less. Put it into the sep funnel. Now add about 20 ml methanol. Pure Methanol and hexane are immiscible but will mix in the presence of crude. A trace of water tips this balance.
Now fill to the top with tap water, no salt. Allow it to settle a minute. Drain the obvious white or funky layer from the hexane. There will still be methanol in it so keep pouring water through until it clears coming out. When the hexane layer returns to its original fill mark the methanol has all been washed out along with polar compounds. Then add another 20 ml methanol and repeat the cycle. After a few cycles you will just end up with a clear lower layer. Wash is then done.
Blue is not a color normally associated with sulfur. Blue in ethanol is usually copper oxides from the large copper stills used to make it. Your situation may be “azulene” from the sound of it, but I have not heard of or seen that during ethanol recovery. Not sure what to make of what little I know of your situation. However, if sulfur is an issue, pure copper mesh soaking in the solution can pull it out. See a recent post on the
Thanks Beaker, I was trying an ad hoc way of doing the same with the only nonpolar I had on hand, limonene, just last night, didn’t work great but I was just winging it. So it helpful to me when you give a tek that spells out order of operation and quantities to use so nicely. I look forward to your further posts on the subject.
I am allowed 5000ppm of heptane or pentane, but less than 300 hexane. I wouldn’t think it would be hard to get below that 300 mark, but 5000 / less toxic = I’d prefer to use. Too bad all the pentane I see requires a 16 liter buy in to get it to ~50$/L.
@puccinia Another non polar solvent I have used and even have a bit left of is dichloromethane. Here is the link from my own order history. It is just barely on the non polar list of solvent polarity and is a halogenated hydrocarbon instead of the typical hydrocarbon arrangements of the chemicals you listed there.
It seems to work just fine as a non polar solvent in the way I use solvents. I did not reorder it because it did not seem to work better than the others AND … it smells like socks worn three too many days if you know what I mean. I can deal with a gasoline smell (hexane, pentane, etc.), but the foot odor on steroids smell? Nope. However it might solve problems perfectly for what you are after? Ear plugs if soft can double as nostril plugs too I suppose…
I also got blue crystals, which screamed copper sulphate to me. (not the ones pictured). I agree that the blue is not the sulphur, but the Cu++.
Only happened when using my 8’x2" copper reflux column on ~10% ethanol with cannabis in it…but I also only use the copper still head when going from low proof starting material, so I’m missing data points.
the alcohol itself was nowhere near as brilliant a shade of blue, but the crystals which formed on the copper still head, and throughout the condensing pathway certainly were. If I recall correctly there was a greenish tinge to the blue solvent.
I’m more than willing to admit to having no clue what actually happened. I’m almost curious enough to try it again and ask for help figuring out the partner to the Cu++…almost.
Oh! Duh! Yes, copper sulfate is definitely blue. And that stuff looks like you have a crazy lot of it! How in the world do you think this happened? That really does look like you had a serious dissolved copper/sulfur ion reaction going on!
as stated, the pretty blue crystals above are not mine. But the color is spot on.
the color of the ethanol was also clearly Cu, it was nowhere near as saturated, and had just a slight greenish tinge.
I initially assumed cannabis made a whole bunch of some protein high is cystine, and I was seeing thermal degradation when boiling biomass in water/low proof ethanol. So I should stop doing that, because it didn’t recover usable solvent
After reading others reports of sulphur in their extracts, and the connection to broad & russet mite control, I decided it was probably my grow team failing to inform me of their ongoing/evolving pest management strategy.
I’d love to solve it, to satisfy my curiosity… but now that I have a CUP, I don’t need to perform that particular trick, so it is unlikely to happen any time soon. Checking in with the grow team may shed some light.
yeah. I don’t think our accounting team tried that either. I ran across it while looking at the possibility of making my own. I was hoping to feed my spent biomass to edible mushrooms, and use them for my carbon source. Paul Stamets is on record suggesting it 10 years ago, but when I tried contacting him a couple of years back he didn’t have a working system yet. He’d had “some success”, but didn’t have time to “take on another project” (cellulosic ethanol from spent cannabis).
I know a very smart youngster who would be more than happy to go exploring down that rabbit hole…I’ve just got to get the tools together for him.
I was planning to just make my own using a few turbo500’s + sugar water + yeast, but I just have trouble with the idea of basically inviting the feds to my space.
I have come to the conclusion that price of solvent is not a big deal if you can recover enough of it efficiently.
