No Heat No Vaccum

Hash and Stuff Pre/Post-Processing
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Anyone else rocking a rocker/orbital oscillator and dry gas sweeping to evap and recover solvent? I guess it’s my “tech.” I’m happy to share, I specifically am tasked with extracts/concentrates that are available next to the fresh flower equivalents. I avoid heat and vacuum in order to retain the maximum number of terpenes. I start with 190 proof EtOH and <-40°C temps all the way to -78°C. Depending on the starting material characteristics I will make a sticky shatter, sticky due to a relatively high % of terpenes. If the material is just right I will make EtOH diamonds.and sauce. N2 is cheaper, but I firmly believe Ar is better. The diamonds are the only place I ever use heat. I will use an initial cold crash or seed Crystal and heat at 95° to crystalize everything that doesn’t come off as mother liquor.

Thanks to all the great minds here and all the free knowledge. Thoughts and critiques welcome. I’m just working within my means and making sure to make concentrates that match the fresh flower.

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I’m wildly curious, and I have no idea what this is :stuck_out_tongue:

Do you Have some photos or diagrams?

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It’s just the shakers you would see in a biochem lab, like so
VWRDS2-2T
Inside a small closed space flowing gas to pull the EtOH out. I then flow the used gas through a large area cooled with a glycol chiller and then through a cold trap before compressing the gas for use again.

I tend to have better luck keeping terps out of the EtOH when the temp in the shaker area is lower(60-70°F) than higher even though a little higher speeds up the process.

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excuse my ignorance, but dry gas sweeping? Can you expand on this subject a little bit, or tell me what i need to look up?

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What, in your opinion, are the advantages of argon over nitrogen?

In my opinion, they’re both completely inert and their effects are indentical when used as sweep gas.

Plus with ethanol, under a hood you’ll never reach 3.3% of air (33,000ppm), so there is virtually zero risk of fire.

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Have you tested

A) residual ethanol levels in your resulting extract

B) tested the evaporated ethanol for terpenes?

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Personally i think the gas companies just have better qc on argon than n2. Mainly dryness and tank care. I wouldn’t argue that they act any different.

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I’ve never had anything hit 5000ppm, but it wouldn’t really bother me if it did. By the time it gets where it’s going it’ll inevitably be lower. I haven’t quantified the terpenes in the ethanol. I haven’t had time to switch the GC column to run something quantitative. Just going off look and smell. It’s just flowing gas over the slabs that would normally be vacuumed, the flow of a gas along with the rocker motion dries it out like a vacuum oven would.

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That was my thought too, but you get higher quality N2, medical grade maybe. Really anything better than industrial grade will be good

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I’ve got my own nitrogen generator, but the pump is huge, loud, and not something I can really get away with right now.

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How long do you sweep and shake to get it below 5000ppm?

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how are you etoh diamonds coming out? what do they look like? how long till you see formation/crash and how long till your diamonds are finished? thanks in advance I was doing some crashing with etoh in oven and getting large spikey looking crystals

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You’re totally right about this–I completely agree! I’ve seen some nasty buildup on valve threads when using foodgrade nitrogen :mask:

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Hey thanks very much for the replies.

You’d say speaking qualitatively, that the terpenes stay in the extract in much greater quantities, than in a traditional evaporation setting?

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Oh, and secondarily. Would this dehydrate the ethanol? If the gases are dried would it pull any trace water out?

Then, do you need to dry the gas before re-use?

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You have cold traps to trap any non gas that is going along with it before you recompress and reuse

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From my experience the succes rate of dropping below 5000ppm hugely depend on the thickness of film its evaporating off…

So do your twsring vigilantely since i saw crudes Being purges at 120C and still found lots and lots of alchohol inside…

Nevertheless a good idea for terp perservation=)

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Are you recovering your ethanol and your gas in the mentioned condenser? Or just the gas and the Etoh floats away for nature to use? Also, do you use a mask when working in this environment and what kind? Thank you

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Wouldn’t the vapor pressure of the terpenes result in them likely coming off with the noble gas as well as the ethanol? Or is this a way of overcoming that?

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From start to finish with all ten shakers going it might take 4-5 days. Less if I am more vigilant. I’m definitely not setting speed records. One reason I use this setup is it’s just me working on it and I can leave it unattended without any in unintended consequences. I also only process one strain at a time so rarely do I actually fill it up, in which case it can be as little as 2 days.