We have been processing material using an Apeks CO2 Transformer for ~6 months. We are taking it slow as we are still have some issues to resolve to get things just right. With that said a few questions have come up that I’m hoping you brilliant folks here can help with!
Worth noting: to keep our learning costs/mistakes to a minimal we are using something in between shake and bud. Mostly tiny buds and final hand trimmed bits.
Yield:
We are consistently seeing recovery results in about the 10-14% range (crude). By the time we filter out fats and lipids and do color remediation we are lucky to see 30% left. We are now weighing everything every step of the way to see if anything sticks out.
Maybe some of you won’t mind sharing what recovery %'s you are getting on your runs with co2? What are you using for product in (bud, shake, something else)?
Cartridges:
Once the above process is done we’re taking the remaining 30% and filling carts with it as is. We don’t add anything to thin it out and it’s very thick (unless it’s warm it doesn’t move). We have tried 10-15 different brand cartridges and pens. They all have a failure rate, some are higher than others but even Ascera and Verified are plugin up. It seems like an air bubble forms over one of the cotton holes and that is typically when the problem starts even if the bubble floats to the top quickly.
Have others experienced the same thing? How did you remedy the issue?
Thank you in advance for taking the time to check out this thread!
Well, the yield is one thing. I would go over all of your pre processing steps to try to get a better yield.
Test the starting material, make sure your yields arent what is to be expected.
If I were you, I would try to fix the clogging carts by removing the terps before you decarb your starting material. You can do this with a freeze dryer or with your apeks extractor, though CO2 terps always smell a little grassy to me.
Adding the terps back in at the end after purging all the ethanol out, that should loosen up the oil a bit and solve some of the cart clogging issues.
Agreed. We are trying some different things to see if we can fix the post-production loss and taking weights of everything along the way so hopefully some of the changes we’ve made will help us recover more.
We don’t decarb the material. We grind up dry material and put it in the machine. The taste of the oil at the end is really nice, smooth and currently gets me nice and ripped.
That’s definitely worth a try! Never thought about it possibly making the oil have a little less viscosity.
You should definitely pull terps first. And then your crude. The refine your crude and add back the terps. Especially if you aren’t decarbing before running the material.
Its really not much more work and is extremely valuable.
What would be the recommended time, pressure and temp to get the terps? Last time we ran for terps we got around 25mL. From a 5L vessel. Does that sound about right?
By which I mean; raw yield means nothing without a potency. You have cannabinoids going in, you have cannabinoids going out, following the “dabbable mass” is not going to tell you where the cannabinoids are.
You might be throwing out 25% cannabinoid “fats and waxes” at winterization if you’re just flailing around blindly (not using in house analytics)
Yes you’re 100% right. Without analytics you’re really running blind. We have sent out some of our end products for testing but each test is almost $750 CAD to get terp profile, solvents, etc. I started reading the in house analytics thread and I’ll get more into it later. Maybe there is something affordable that we can have at the lab that will allow us to test the material with a lot of frequency.
Great suggestion and we will give it a try! The biggest issue we ran into with CO2 and decarbing was the color gets really dark. Even with color remediation it’s hard to get it even to the color that we get without decarbing before any remediation. At least that’s what we have found.
Do you add the terpenes after you pull it out of the vac oven and just before putting it in the filling machine or can they be added and then left in the oven at a lower 80 degrees keeping it under vacuum until ready.
We filter the first time with 10 micron then move down to 1.5 micron.
We try to make it like ground coffee not powdery. What have you found works the best for you?
Any brand in particular that you have had success with? We had heard that TLC results are not very accurate but I see some brands claim they see a 1% +/- difference from HGLC testing.
Do the terp pull first, then main run. Reintroduce terps to crude at 3-7%. Also suspect hardware is part of the issue. We use Jupiter CCell with no issues on raw CO2 oil.
Will also give those carts that you suggest a try!
We tried those all glass cartridges and it looks great before use, but once they are used it starts to look fuggly. Additionally with the ones we tried the body / glass is thicker than most cartridges so it can be a problem for some vape devices. I’m not sure if these ones have cotton inside.
Here’s what it looks like after it’s been used for a while. This isn’t that bad, other carts have the dark middle all the way to the top and look really bad. Also that much material shouldn’t be passing through IMHO.
