It’s my first time posting here so ill do the best I can. I’m having some continuous issues with our recovery setup. We are currently running a passive set up with a custom made brazen plate exchanger with a dry ice coil post exchanger set up and duel desiccant towers pre exchanger. We have an issue of what seems to be oil that is building up and clogging our entire recovery chain. We’ve done everything from swapping lines,adding mesh screens in our reactor, adding mesh screens post desiccant towers pre exchanger inlet, hexane and alcohol pushing the recovery chain, lowering the temp on our water heater and slowing our push to manage the level inside of our reactor. Our big boss is all about numbers so on average we have our water heater set to 180f. My guess that our problem stems from that because ive yet to see anyone that boils off their solvent at that temp apart from us but without it at that temp we can’t meet production needs. Im curious to see what your guys thoughts are on how to fix/prevent this issue cause my team and myself are kind of at our whits end.
How much head room you have when ur recovering?
U doing cbd? 180 seems high to me. Im at 120 bit that is bho. I roto vape at 140 when i winterize.
Is ur end goal distillate?
My molecular sieve is elevated above recovery tank. I noticed if i slung it lower than i had a lil getting into it. Diff evap temps ur working with.
Im sure someone here will have a better insight than me. But willing to ping pong some ideas with u. U got a pic of ur setup?
Im planning on going both passive and active next upgrade. Seems both have a purpose.
Only time I ever got oil (atleast a real noticeable amount) in my recovery lines is when I let my collection over-boil, at the beginning of recovery when my collection is “full”
Our end goal is crumble. I know its a super high temp to be running with but its the bosses orders. Our desiccant towers our sitting above our reactor. Ill have some pics when I get in a little later today. The oil that is building up looks almost identical to our end crumble. We do the best we can to leave a foot of room when recovering. 75% of the time that’s how much room we leave. Some times its gets higher then that.
That was the case with me. Not often but when tank way full was my thinking. Then i set the sieve higher and nver had issue after. Im not alchol guy but happened to me in roto vape puking ovet a couple times when winterizing.
Whats ir thoughts on the 180 temp? That doesnt darken the oil?
The reason that were cooking at the 180 is to process our runs in an hour and a half. We do large batch runs. Average single run is usually around 120lbs of biomass or higher.
This is our recovery set up. The reactors are daisy chained. Left one does the bulk of the pull down. We transfer to the one on the right to finish the pull down on before we pour. Recovery runs to those two skinny desiccant towers. We only pull recovery on one vessel at a time so both of those towers are active on either reactor at any given time.
Those moleseives look small for runs that size. Some people here have talked about running expansion columns prior to sieve to catch any hash that makes it over.
Your seives look a lil lower than ur pot? Im pretty stoned atm. A continual slope upwards with the lines. Doesnt have tob verticle like i did. If im seeing correctly lol length isnt issue i found in my case it was the upward slope and most likely from when i allowed collection to get to high in tank.
Nice setup for sure.
How long a run take ?
Im setbup to run 120lb at a time. I isualy run about 60lbs. I need better pump or do hybrid system. This passive is catching my attention
It’s commonly referred to as bumping. You’re letting your reactor get too full before you begin recovery. Either your solution is too cold and foaming excessively, or too hot and recovering too aggressively.
If you just had a small amount building up over time I’d be more inclined to believe it was the result of an improperly setup mol sieve.
We run recovery as we push into our reactor. We’ve definitely done some bumping here and there. What concerns me is that even with a lower level in our reactor we still seem to run into the issue even with a fresh set of vapor lines, valves, and desiccat towers hooked up.
