might be worth a shot, its potential high terp affinity/low cannabinoid affinity would hold impurities, and help “squeeze” out cannabinoids of the primary solvent, give a shot starting at 5% r134a, scale up the ratios from there!
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you bought that whole plant for like $4M+? Has it been installed and started up??
Can someone post a miscibility or solubility chart for 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane aka r134a
Or maybe just add it to this chart
To be clear I’m not doing this and I’m not endorsing this. I don’t know enough about how this solvent behaves.
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Way late to the party, but I recommend jacketed extraction vessels for this reason.
My biggest question is, will combining a hydrofluorocarbon with a hydrocarbon contaminate the hydrocarbon indefinitely? Maybe some sort of unbreakable azeotrope or even a chemical conversion…
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I don’t have experience using refrigerant for cannabis extraction, but I have worked in a plant that used it to remove mineral oil from polymer based fiber post spin. We ran through activated carbon beds to strip out the bulk oil and then went into distillation for final purification of the solvent. The only chemical we ever ran into issues with was a deliberate introduction of bleach. The bleach transferred through the distillation process and carried over into the solvent preheaters where it underwent a chemical reaction and became extremely corrosive (most likely chloride stress corrosion cracking) to our stainless piping. We first noticed the problem when we began developing pinhole leaks at stainless weld joints, and in the end replaced hundreds of thousands of dollars of piping and condenser end bells.
Like I said, not a chemist, so I’m not sure if any of that info was helpful, but I hope it was at least interesting.
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Hi All,
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Any questions you have, we are happy to answer!
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where are these results and why does it look like 3-4 different accounts trying to say this is the future yet no residual or heavy metal reports
Show current full panels. Have anyone purchased the machines or just watch them be run at their facility
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Is the acetone and stuff a result of the freon? Or is there additional solvents? What do you fellow future4200ers think?
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Or even:
“If you’re dumb enough to buy it then we are bold enough to sell it.”
From working under similar ownership I can attest to that level of beurocracy that even sometimes can get in the way of good production. Story of my life. puff puff then passes the blunt
After reading the whole thread I really am curious as to how selective R134a seems to be against THCa such that I could use R134a to maayybee crash out THCa in a liq-liq solvent crash with an alkane (butane or whichever is more non-polar).
Also, using R134a for sweeping off terps before doing a shatter run seems very useful though I hear propane is already used for this purpose as well as warm N2.
According to Wikipedia, one of the metabolites of Isopropanol is Acetone. I’m not versed on what conditions would create such metabolites but seems to me that if you had isoproyl alcohol come in contact with the crude then I would expect that’s where you got the Acetone from…perhaps the methanol too depending on how pure the isopropyl alcohol is that was used.
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I hear people use sub critical c02 for terp collecting/terp chasing. Though I also hear you have have your system pretty well dialed in to get that down.
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yeah ive seen a video in a cloosed loop group on fb, though there was no data to prove anything so no way to verify 
A couple of months late, sorry. So 134a is miscible with lower alcohols, ketones, chlorinated solvents. I’m going to search through my files for something more specific.
Tech sheet: https://www.chemours.com/en-/media/files/propellants/freon-134a-technical-information.pdf
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not happening in australia.
you need a refrigeration license to use it here even though it has such a low carbon footprint
and is nearly 0 ozone depletion.
once our government has something it does not give it back.
massive fines for importation too unless already in an air conditioner below a set size
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are you working with DEVEX machine? CryoEx 400?
Just going to chime in and say the worst terps I’ve ever had (and I mean the worst) were extracted with R134a. The lab didn’t even bother running them they smelled so bad.
Of course, that could have been an incompetent extractor or piss-poor starting material. But they did in fact smell like piss. This is my only experience with this solvent. I think it’s a shill product intended to profit off of wannabe extractors and/or people who don’t know where to get butane.
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My experience is similar. R134a extracted a bunch of extra smells and colors
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I’m not worried about color on terpenes, personally, but these definitely were some of the darkest I’ve seen. I think that “water clear” does not represent quality in the slightest. If anything, the pale yellow terpenes with a hint of cloud have been some of the best I’ve had. I know that seems ass-backwards but I think we are all trying to over refine terpenes to be clear to look clean.
These were gold-amber which again some of the best terps I’ve had were darker. I think when we try to pull all of these other impurities like waxes and pigments we are one-by-one also removing more and more groups of aromatic compounds. For quite some time I’ve had a crazy theory that cloudy terps are better because we’re still seeing a lot of the water solubles left behind. At 5% terpenes it’s not going to affect the clarity of the oil in my experience.
R134a definitely had a really nasty grass smell to them. Reminded me of hemp that didn’t fully dry and was left in a tote for a year or 6.
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