What are the most cost effective ethanol chilling solutions available nowadays? Been using a permacool setup for 2-3 years now and to date have loved it, really was a great system. However, we’ve seen a near complete system failure which has opened my eyes to the cost and headache of repairing these type of outdoor refrigerant systems. Components cant be repaired… just replaced, they cost an arm and a leg, when one part blows it affects the others, combined with next to zero support from the company directly which basically bases their business model on hiring 3rd party hvac to commision the installs and support. If you live in the middle of nowhere your fucked. Our current chilling needs are 24 30gallon cycles per day from room temp to -40 on 30 min intervals. We have -80 deep freezers but can only run at about half that capacity (dissolving crude 7:1) while our chiller is down and adding a whole winterizing and secondary recovery stream to the lab is not sustainable with current cbd prices at .15c a gram for kg’s. Running room temp ‘biomass’ non winterized extracts through the FFE is also far from ideal the amount of crud produced is nasty. Haven’t been equipment shopping in a while but are there any more cost effective solutions out there nowadays? Or alternate filtration solutions that can address lipids and gums without chilling? Any insight is greatly appreciated. Currently extracting w denatured eth btw.
I’m pretty sure that @MagisterChemist could help you solve these problems.
Membranes are your new best friend.
If money was no option… I’d love to have one of these to play with
you’d need an external liquid nitrogen tank for volume though
Dry ice or i have a couple new -80 40L 220v chillers im considering selling?
I currently use dry ice and coils to chill due to lack of power
Direct cooling with liquid nitrogen evaporation.
see the cryometrix I linked… tech version of this
Until you get that LN2 bill.
I have a customer in California that is replacing all of LN2 chilling with large outdoor chillers. His current LN2 bill is roughly 30k/month… He will have his chiller paid off in three months of OPx savings over the LN2… The chiller is roughly $2,700/mo to run at 24/7 use with 26kW @ -50.
It’s all startup costs vs long term costs. If people can afford or finance a nice chiller, it’s the way to go. If not, LN2 isn’t a bad idea at first.
Getting things cold is expensive, basically no matter how you try to do it. You can spend capex or opex, but you’re going to spend.
So try to avoid going cold.
Or hot. Hot’s cheaper than cold, but if you need to get rid of the hot, you usually have to use cold.
Maybe we should try not putting joules into something just to take them out later or otherwise waste them? Sounds like crazy talk to me.
shoot some propane in and recovery pump it back out
I used Permacool before I joined Delta Separations alongside a full suite of Delta ethanol gear. I completely agree with your sentiment. By the end of my experience with Permacool I was teaching their tech Glen how to fix his own machines.
At Delta we developed the DC-40 specifically to give customers an alternative to the Permacool. The service for the condensers is handled by our team and G&D Chillers in Portland who are badass.
Consider checking it out. My other suggestions are the L80 from Cryometrix, and the InstaCool series from TruSteel. Both are solid systems with good ROI.
The balance is always between the cost of operating cold and the cost of remediating hot-extracted shit
Sure is. But there are pretty good tools now for ensuring that all that other shit doesn’t make it to the end of the line.
It’s almost always easier to not extract something than to remediate it later.
The real question is:
Is it cheaper or more operationally efficient to not extract shit or to remediate shit?
That’s an interesting question, and one for which the answer usually boils down to “it depends” for the vast majority of operators. To answer it, you need to know things like capex and opex and energy cost and solvent cost and labour rates and a host of other things.
My personal belief is that in many cases, someone making the type of products that are best produced from a cold ethanol extract would probably be better served by hot-extracting shit and dealing with that shit later on.
But that depends on all of the elements in the equation.
Just got our unit back up and running today after 3-4 weeks of downtime due to mismatching parts sent, lack of guidance or any help… was a super frustrating and expensive experience to say the least.
As always, YMMV. Wholeheartedly agree with the lot of this. Every situation is different, which is why consults with knowledgeable people are a must.
Will agree to disagree that it’s better to run hot tho. Some bells are costly to unring, which is more capex which you are hoping to avoid in the first place. I’d suggest building your lab to accept as wide a variety of input material as possible to remain solvent in the long run. Especially if you’re talking large scale hemp.
yea. scale hemp is a big no-no for warm extracts. ’ biomass ’ just puts out too much shit in a warm crude extract. I’ve seen some decent results with room temp iso extracts with complex filtrations that could almost make an argument for…but cold is better. quality material harvested with care, it might be easier/cost effective to ‘deal with the shit’ but not field dried tractor harvested hemp. thats for sure!
Agreed. With large field crops like hemp/cannabis, extensive pre-acceptance testing is mandatory, as is extracting a small test batch and finding out if any undetectable (ppt) nasties are going to turn into red flags after you’ve run the whole lot.
Right now on site we’ve got in our extraction queue:
- hand-harvested hemp that would probably be smokable quality in other markets
- supersacks of large hemp branches with buds still on them
- hemp material that’s probably still close to 20% moisture content
- dried, milled and nitrogen purged hemp in mylar bags
- dried ~18% THC cannabis
- fresh frozen cannabis
- “fresh frozen” blocks of weed-ice as big as your head
- milled and bagged CBG hemp biomass
The branches are a bit of a bitch to deal with but we’ve got that piece dialled in now.
Being versatile and being able to handle any of the above along with whatever else the world may throw at you is the only way to survive. Innovate and keep getting better or die.
And we’re doing all of that with room temperature exractions.
There are many many ways to skin any particular cat. I like ours, but it’s certainly not the One True Way.
Start with your desired outputs (type and quality and quantity) and work backwards to figure out what the best path to get there might be.
If you’re not doing the pubco / IP play / IPO game, figure out what you need to do to have a competitive business today, tomorrow, and five years from now.
What worked yesterday might not be the best thing to do tomorrow. Maybe it’s something shiny and new and exciting. Maybe what worked 100 years ago is actually still great.
Working through a problem from first principles can be enlightening.
Magisterchemist’s high volume solvent wash technique seems to make a pretty decent extract without a lot of fuss. Seems like the clear winner over cold extracted.
Either way membranes seem to do a good job.
What is the cost and longevity of these membranes any idea? I’ve started doing light research. Let’s say 1000 gallons extracted ethanol produced daily.
Right. But membrane skids are capex just like chillers. Not as expensive for sure, but it requires forethought and design nonetheless.