Hey everyone! Im alil new here and to the community. Currently I am an extractor in the mid-west with about a year of solid experience. Recently our facility has decided to process RSO. Yesterday one of our new employees mistakenly winterized 800g of Live Resin sugar that was originally supposed to be sent to distillation. After about 5 hours in the oven - it buddered up. Is there any way to correctly process this product into RSO? We run our Huber at -32 Celsius and Winterize with an industrial freezer so i do not see any issues of residual fats or lipids being present. Any information will be greatly appreciated, Im trying to learn as much as i can from this community!
first of all i need to say i hate the term RSO. what is sold today is not technically RSO (thankfully) but is usually just a full spectrum extract, sometimes with actual plant material in it.
first what exactly is your end goal product in RSO?
this should be easily do able. RSO will need to be fully active, so youll wanna decarb that budder. honestly just decarb it and thats âRSOâ
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please define âRSOâ in your world?
does it have to be so green itâs black?
do you have a delivery method in mind?
why would you send a premium product such as âlive resin sugarâ to distillate?!?
distillate is what you make when you canât sell your primary extract without further processing.
decarbed, winterized crude is an appropriate starting point for distillation. itâs also a decent approximation of RSO. can you explain how winterizing said sugar made in unfit for your distillation process?
many (even most) folks winterize pre distillationâŚdepending on your crude source, it may be a requirement.
sounds a lot like âlive resin sugarââŚ
if you donât like the taste/texture/whatever, you could decarb it and send it to distillate now.
can you please detail why is it in a vac oven.
neither distillate nor RSO require going into a vac oven first. although some folks like to decarb in their vacuum ovens.
edit: what was your extraction solvent? Iâm guessing the âethanolâ in the tag line is a red herring.
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I know it isnt âtrueâ RSO. We use dry trim from our flower, soak in 3 parts ethanol then freeze for atleast 24 hours. Filter the product twice - then rotovap to remove the ethanol . We are currently decarbing with a ACCUTEMP19 vacuum oven. Usually we do not have issues with decarbing . Im just confused as to WHY it buddered up as it did . This has never happened before with any other products . Including our ethanol bucket we use to clean our Live Resin glassware.
We had an ridiculous amount of that strain. Out here we cant sell bulk product like rec states can. We decided to re purpose that material into distillate. We really only process Live resin. And yes , we decarb our crude before it goes to distillation.
do you know anyone who doesnât?!?
I asked several questions.
none of which were âdo you decarb before distillation?â
itâs really hard to help if you donât answer direct questions. harder still if you chose to answer different questions instead.
and then your new employee bought it back up in ethanol, and put it in the freezer again?
I donât believe youâre explaining your process, or problem well.
title says âRSO issueâ. here youâre defining it as âdecarb was weirdâ.
please be more specific about your process, and your question. maybe even answer some of the questions that you have been asked.
eg what temp is the oven? note that your first post does not scream âit buttered during decarbââŚmost folks bitching about buttering in the vac oven are trying to produce slabsâŚ
if there are THCA crystals in your decarb vat, you have not reached decarb temps. period.
did you know you can boil water in a paper cup over an open fire? until the water is gone, the paper canât get much hotter than the boiling point of water?
why is this relevant? until the ethanol is gone, it doesnât mater what temp you set the oven to, your product wonât go over the boiling point of ethanol. so it wonât decarb.
imo the most likely reason for âbutterâ in your decarb is residual solvent. so tell us EXACTLY what was done. times, temps, how you reproof your solventâŚ
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We have had problems with RSO decarbing. We winterize using dry plant material and denatured ethanol. We filter over several days to get fats/lipids and any stray plant material out of product. The product is then sent to rotary evaporation and MOST of the ethanol is taken out. The next step is when we decarb. The problem we have been having is that regardless of the temperature and duration in the oven, product has still been âactiveâ , and in one case buddered up as mentioned. For example, we have decarbed multiple products (at different times) at temperatures ranging from 180 F to 250 F of durations from 5-15 hours, (longer time in oven for lower temps). We are confused as to why our product is no longer properly decarbing. Could the plant itself be affecting this? Something with the ethanol? Perhaps an equipment problem we cant find? We used 200 proof denatured ethanol. We typically use dry plant material, but have recently used crude, but both are still reacting the same way (bubbling and activity / forming together). Thank you for any help
Is there any sort of agitation while you undergo the final solvent recovery/decarb step? It should have a stir bar or realistically it should be done inside of a reactor vessel. How much vacuum is your product under during decarb?
We do not agitate the product, however, this has never been a problem for us in the past and we successfully decarbed many products with no agitation. But we agree that this is definitely another variable that needs added. If it helps, we were successfully decarbing our RSO with no agitation at 200 F for roughly 14 hours, 30 in hg vac and getting really good lab results. The 30 in hg vac is something we have not changed. Furthermore, we use an 8 cup red pyrex measuring glass. We never fill it up more than halfway (usually 3 1/2 cups) which is usually between 600-700g of product.
This post hurts my head
Trying to describe and elaborate on stuff to people using wildly inaccurate vernacular makes the job of explaining something to them like converting gallons to inches.
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Let me know what confuses you and I will clarify
Even if it hasnât been a problem in the past, if youâre working with a new product you run the risk of new problems.
Apologies, when I say new product, I am referring to using a new strain. Could each individual plant strain cause new problems specifically at the decarb step?
At 30" of vacuum your ethanol is not even going to boil until sume wher over 99c /210ish f⌠OK look these numbers up to get the exact this is just on the fly here
Didnât you say this is âlive resin sugarâ instead of the typical crude you normally run?
Also use this tool to figure out what you need to be running your oven temp vs vacuum at to reach solvent removal and decarb temperatures: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/chemistry/solvents/learning-center/nomograph.html
are you reusing your solvent?
itâs not 200 proof the second time.
do you have a proofing gauge?
wait, weâve got from âlive resinâ back to RSO?
âŚand that âlive resinâ is made using dry plant material?
if this is your primary extraction, please donât call it winterizing.
if you are extracting dry material, please donât call it live resin.
decarboxylation is required to âactivateâ THCA, so saying your product is still active after decarb is probably not a great word choice either.
where are you measuring that temp? where you set your vac oven?!?
see: boiling water in a paper cup for why that doesnât work.
yep. if itâs not dry.
yep. same as above. water.
sure. when did you last change the oil on the vac pump on your rotovap? maybe youâre leaving more solvent in there. again see: boiling water in a paper cup (ask the all knowing one).
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ok so what has changed (besides the plant material/input)?
did you change labs?
did your lab change something? (worth an ask)
new application in grow?
See: Question on How To Properly Decarb Crude - #24 by cyclopath
when you bring crude up in ethanol, then get it cold, THAT is winterizing.
when you bring dry plant material up in cold ethanol, thatâs a tincture, and your primary extraction. you then filter the plant material out. if you extracted cold, you left the fats IN the plant material. so youâre not filtering those out. there are way faster ways of filteringâŚget yourself a panda.
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Sorry, the original post was another person. The live resin sugar is the product that buddered up. It was the first time it happened but it wont happen again as we will not use those products for our RSO.
Anyways, the main consistent problem is that our product is no longer fully decarbing correctly when we have had no changes to our process. We ONLY use dry plant material and ethanol. And the only change happening from each batch of RSO is simply a different plant strain.
A lot of you are focusing on my wording and vernacular. I understand it may not be correct and can confuse you all, but I simply need to know why, WITH NO CHANGES TO OUR PROCESS, what could be affecting the decarboxylation of it. The only change is the strain of plant used. We successfully decarbed hundreds of thousands of grams of RSO, and then all of a sudden the product just stopped decarbing properly.
I will be looking into the machines, but regular oil changes are done, things are cleaned and emptied etc. I will also be looking into our ethanol now. We have re-used our ethanol with no problems in the past either, and have tested the process both with new 200 proof ethanol and re-used ethanol both resulting in successful decarbs.
Are you using cold traps in line between your oven and your vacuum?
Are you checking the decarb temperature using the oven or do you have a probe inside the resin?