I know that you are a fan of the hydrocarbon falling film evaporator and I’m guessing that’s what you are hinting at by saying I’m on the right track.
I agree that for the fastest throughput, a tube-in-shell evaporator would reign supreme.
For making crude with hydrocarbons, whether active or passive, I definitely think that a tube-in-shell evaporator makes much more sense than a giant collection pot like BHogart or Purge labs use.
I mostly make dabbing oil and live resin. I also usually have multiple different batches of varying size to get through in a work day. Some batches are really small others large. Would it make sense to run a 3lb batch through a FFE sized to handle the 70lb batch coming up next?
IMO, it is much easier to have multiple collection pots on hand than multiple FFE’s to facilitate my needs and I’m willing to sacrifice a little recovery speed for that perceived ease-of-use.
I was also a little unsure about how CIP would work out with a FFE. For running multiple flavors of live resin I would need to be sure the evaporator is completely cleaned out. I can’t have even .5g of that gassy GMO contaminating the fruity zkittles batch coming up next. I understand the CIP procedure would be to cool the evaporator and flood with clean solvent. This would take time and also the solvent that was flushed through the evaporator would need to be recovered from the jacketed receiver like a standard collection pot. That would also take time. I’m thinking I can open a collection pot and clean it out in a comparable time to getting a FFE cleaned and ready to go again.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone who is well versed in FFE operation, like yourself, has these issues all sorted out. I am used to batch, pot-style recovery so I decided to stick to that for my system upgrade mostly because it’s what I know and it didn’t make sense to spend a bunch of money switching FFE which may present other unforeseen issues.
Like I said, for large scale crude where there aren’t multiple batches that need to be separated I would be on team FFE all day.