So I get most of the solvent out, cold crash it to get a few seed crystals and then keep it at 90-95f until growth slows down. I usually get crystals the size of pebbles. I really only try for diamonds, when I can clearly tell the material is better suited for it. Quality as well as smell are the main factors there.
I absolutely believe I am able to keep more terps this way than when I use a vacuum oven. It’s going to pull out the ethanol and any water along with some terps unfortunately. I am not opposed to redrying if it needs it, but the cold trap takes care of it generally.
I will constantly play with the shaker speed when I have time and am try to do the best in the least amount of time.
I recover both. I only use a mask if I’m having to do maintenance or fiddle with my setup. Once it’s closed, nothing is getting out.
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You are always going to lose some of the lighter terpenes. Stupid thermodynamics, lol. The somewhat slower rate causes alot of the terpenes to come together during the evaporation and I think that helps keep them in there versus the EtOH.
I wonder how well this would work in a wiper 
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you mean 90-95f?
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Yes definitely, thanks. I fixed it.
Might work but viscosity is an issue at room temp
Yah I was thinking 40-45C might be a good spot for it
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Haven’t gotten to use a wiper before, seems to different(temp/vacuum) but I really don’t know. I’ve done SPD before the disaster. My partners wanted cartridges to match the flower they sold. That market has disappeared for the time being where I’m at.
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I apologize in advance if this question has been answered before, but the search here wasn’t too fruitful and the googles wasn’t either, but how do you recover the inert gas? Will a normal recovery pump work for this? Just recover back into another gas tank and it’s good to go?
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Yep, unless something goes wrong it goes right back into an empty tank. I have a little setup with a moisture and o2 sensor like you would find in a glove box that I use to make sure it’s still ready to straight back in a tank.
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Thanks for the info! I think you’re extraction method is pretty darn cool!
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I had heard about using hot nitrogen sweeps to speed evap but not this- super interesting.
How much did the system cost and how much material can you process per week to finished product?
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This is really just my solvent recovery. My extraction methods are dwarfed by others on here. I just extract with -40°C or below material and EtOH. I don’t have a jacketed centrifuge so I just use two vacuum collection chambers. The first normal, the second for maximizing recovered EtOH with a nitrogen push after moving to the new fully vacd chamber and the flow slows.
I think I’m at about 12-15k including extraction, plus this solvent recovery setup. The production limit is really my day job, lol. If I had time for only this I could do several hundred pounds a week, but the limiting factor is the batch sizes as I only do one strain at a time. The gas compressor is probably the most expensive item. You can find the moisture and o2 sensors for a couple hundred different places. The oscillating tables are cheap. You can find used ones on eBay for $40 or so. I have ten in my recovery chamber. My recovery chamber is just a polycarbonate shell that I have leak proofed enough to not leak low pressure argon or allow o2 or moisture in. I have an instrumentation background so most stuff has been canabilized and repurposed. I’ve never bought a new vacuum pump only used and the gas compressor was used also. I built it a price at a time over a year or so as I figured out what worked with my workflow. It’s just me and only when I’m not at the day job, so I tried to tailor it to what I could handle.
Here in a couple days I’ll change GC columns and quantify the terps in the recovered EtOH.
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Pictures of your extracts? Also are you able to send off for 3rd part testing for potency and terpene%?? Generally my ethanol extracts have 1-5% terpenes. 5% being rare.
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I have to do my own testing for now, but I have access to an analytical chem lab. I’ll try to get some chromatograms posted soon. But definitely higher than 5% on most strains. The FF and Zkittles have been making straight up diamonds and sauce. It depends on what gets sent to me. I can’t make them appear, but I can sure mitigate losing what is already there.
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Good point about recovery haha.
Your op may not be big time, but your recovery methods are very unique!
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