Thank you and excited to be in the group. I’m currently in California where we grow and extract and Colorado where we just grow. We are about to open a second extraction facility and I don’t want to screw myself.
My current extraction facility we have a random BHO 10 LB unit and Genius Alcohol Extraction 2 50 L Rotos, a pope machine, a 5 L short path, plus a vac oven, which we got sold the dream on, which honestly is decent but had to be modified to get working to 100%. I personally do not like their attitudes and broken promises after spending a ton with them so I would like to steer away from them for our future purchases. Currently making 60-80 liters a month of Distillate
I need to make monthly at my second lab:
100 liters of THC Distillate
100 liters of CBD Distillate
200 Kilos of CBD Isolate
For ethanol extractions, I’d recommend the Cup15 from Delta Seperations and the Falling Film Evaporator from BizzyBee or from Pinnacle Stainless. That would be enough to cover well beyond your extraction needs and both are certified systems.
Some thoughts on Rotary Evaporators with the full knowledge that I am all about Heidolph in terms of quality, support and functionality. Their 20L system with the Distimatic auto-feed module is pretty slick for high volume throughput:
• Double the solvent recovery vs. 50L rotovap!
• No flask handling, no risk of catastrophic break!
• Auomated, unattended function eliminates labor costs!
In addition to the evaporation rate of the solvent, several other steps must also be accounted for when calculating total throughput of a rotovap:
• time for bath heat up
• time between runs for flask handling
• downtime for maintenance
Heidolph’s Hei-VAP Industrial 50+ 24/7 Pkg offers the only fully automated rotary evaporator system on the market.
That means the rotary evaporator can be left to run unattended, automatically, 24/7. No flask changes necessary, no operator required to be present to run the system.
Many people think that the way to double the evaporation rate of a 20L rotovap is to move up to a 50L flask. However in reality, this only offers approx 40% increase in evaporation rate because the wattage of the bath and chiller, as well as the surface area of the condensers, do not increase proportionally.
At an evaporation rate of 13L per hour, Hei-VAP Industrial 50+ 24/7 will reclaim over 300L in a 24hr. period. That’s double the amount of recovery in a 50L rotovap over the course of an 8hr shift, without even accounting for the lengthy and precarious flask change procedure required to handle a large 50L flask full of product.
For THC we plan to blast with BHO to make crude and then refine with ethanol extraction. For the CBD I would like to stay with ethanol in my opinion I think its cleaner. Then turn into isolate. Any input on the best isolate equipment would be great
What size Pope did you purchase at your first facility? Are you using it for your first cut and then over to the short path? Or both passing batches at once?
You are not alone. Almost as common a problem as being sold on a CO2 extractor, lots of people have bought into the Genius deception… I’d gladly help you assess your situation and come up with a plan to adapt and move forward
lol I feel you we started with CO2 then got sold by Genius as why just do ethanol as you have to put it threw ethanol anyways and you can run so much more, do a weeks worth of CO2 in a day with Genius. In my opinion to be the most efficient and productive is to blast BHO (even though I’m not a fan of BHO) into crude then do ethanol roto vap then short path. Bizzybee for that FFE is 117k right? I really want to focus more on isolate on this lab so any direction for the best equipment for that would be legit and appreciated.
For 100l/month I would move up to a 4" glass jacketed Pope, or Helderpad KDL6/KDT6. These models are much more scalable than the 2" Pope - and the Helderpad machine has I believe a 6" still body at a competitive price point. Once you move beyond the 2" Pope you get options like a fully jacketed, heated path. On the SPD end I would move up to a 10L or 20L.