I have been learning spd for a little while now and when I take my tests in, I was told to test for potency, rsa and pesticides. My recent test was run twice and came out at 78% THC. Am I in the ball park for potency? I only seem to get up to 82% at most. Also, when reading test results, what pesticides should I be looking out for? I use sequoia labs in Sacramento Ca. If anyone knows a better facility, I’d love feedback. I’m expecting another test soon so I’ll post the results as well.
Not positive but sequoias lab has been not operating for a few weeks. All pesticides are bad so if you have any present close to or above the levels allowed it will be a fail, and prob not safe to consume. Myclo is a common one. With the new regulations new permits and licensing are now in place for test facilities. S C Labs is not in taking from new clients. If you go on there page they state this I’m pretty sure.
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CW in the bay is who I use. Those numbers are a little low, do you have a chromatogram?
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The client I was helping doesn’t have chromotography equipment so no saline scrub or chromo was used.
“Chromatogram”
a noun
“a visible record (such as a series of colored bands, or a graph) showing the result of separation of the components of a mixture by chromatography.”
And looks something like this. With this information, which the testing facility should give you, we can much better help you isolate why you may have lower potency numbers.
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Please request a chromatogram from them. If they give you any problems, let me know and I will get it for you from them
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I’m on it. I asked for the chromatogram.
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while we are at it, give us a summary of your setup, including which vac pump, glassware, and vac grease.
The set up is a summit mantle, 5L chem glass boiling flask, lab society head, digi vac, 2021 I adixen pump, Krytox grease and AI round flasks. Also an AI cold trap. A bit of a Frankenstein.
Nothing wrong with that, sometimes you gotta get it done! The only thing questionable is possibly the CT. Is that a dry ice trap?
It is a dry ice ct. they also have a chemglass ct with a chiller coil so we swapped to that.
Are you using any adsorbents, like carbon?
Before the first pass we winterize and carbon scrub with activated charcoal. Not using cbleach.
How are you filtering that carbon out? I suggest you use a mix of carbon and bleaching clays fyi
Filtered out the carbon using Büchner funnels with lab nerd filters. Used some of the material to make some shatter as well and that came out fire. They didn’t test it though. What bleaching/clay agent should I be using with the activated charcoal?
Theres a chance that the acid activated carbon is making it to your boiling flask, which would cause isomerization and read as lower potency
To prevent this in the future, should I use silicate as a filter medium?
Yes
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I have recently run into this same issue of lower potency yields and have had some lengthy discussions with both the test lab and others with more experience in the field than myself. At first I thought perhaps my winterization efforts weren’t thorough enough because I had been hitting 80s earlier this year no problem. However, rewinterizing proved futile and provided no further benefit after distilling and testing again. I am now suspicious of my pre-processing so I thought I would bring it up here to get everyone’s thoughts on the subject. Here’s the process we’ve been using lately:
- Grind
- Decarb/dry in a forced air oven.
- Extract via CO2 supercritical.
- Winterize crude.
- Filter (no scrubbing, just fast filtering, rewinterize and slow filter)
- Roto
- Distill via a BR rig.
The only thing we’re doing different than previously is decarbing in the oven so I’m thinking that perhaps that may be affecting the outcome either directly or perhaps indirectly by impacting the carbonic acid content. Then again I might not know what the heck I’m talking about. Also, we aren’t seeing any crazy big peaks next to the delta-9 that would indicate delta-10 although we did have some delta-8 that I attribute to running the heat rate too slow on the front end before hitting the head fraction causing it to sit too long before reacting. Any ideas?