Pray to the diamond Gods for me (& what temp is best?)

[tweedledew]

A guide to making your own membrane skid for not very much money

I truly think I offer the best membrane skids on the market currently, in terms of hardware quality, engineering, energy use, automation, etc. However, not everyone needs a fancy peer reviewed skid. Some people operate DIY everything. I’ve been there many times in my life. Many times I had to come up with a solution without a lot of money, and I didn’t care about peer reviews. So for everyone in the DIY mode, here is a guide to making a simplified membrane system without a lot of money, featuri…

Started there

Bought a hydracell D10 head off eBay for $750
Got the tubes & fittings for $1200
Membranes were $400ish apeice (courtesy of @MagisterChemist)
Motor was $700
VFD was $400

I had lots of high pressure hoses and swagelock stuff from when I built a couple CO2 extractors. But I’d tack on another $600 or so for ancillary parts and hoses.

AC DIY chiller with pump $150

I run around 40-50lph solvent removal. I can do about 30-40lbs per hour with my little panda army (3x $200)

Methanol in bulk is under $2/L

Shredder (optional) $2k on eBay for live material. Or else on dried material a leaf blower in reverse seems to work ok? Dunno that’s what a buddy of mine uses.

Probably throw an extra grand at the setup for random small bits and bobs, wires, pipes, etc.

Can do around 30lbs per hour being pretty lazy 50ish if I was trying hard. 150/h+ with another couple grand invested.

I could throw a couple more housings onto it and get 150+lph solvent removal/dewaxing. Or else I hear there’s some new methanol rated membranes doing over 100lph on a 2540. But then my bottleneck is my pandas/fuge. But I average around 1lb per litre of solvent on mid grade material.