All great questions and feedback! Sorry in advance this is so long…
I’d like to first point out that the main intent of the packer/unpacker is to remove the most labor and time intensive portion of the entire process e.g. packing and unpacking. Any additional material packed into each column while maintaining percent yields and not having to expand other equipment, such as solvent tanks, etc. is a huge bonus on top of the time and labor savings of automating packing and unpacking with existing amounts of material. For many of our clients, automating unpacking alone is worth the cost. Especially those running fresh frozen, or even worse, in continuously chilled rack mounted and jacketed -40C (or lower) columns. Removing this material by hand is… well, you can imagine I’m sure.
Back to the topic of putting in more material; solvent flow times do increase when adding more biomass. However, that time sacrifice is insignificant when compared to the time and labor savings of automating packing and unpacking. It can also be mitigated by tailoring pressure differential between solvent tank and collection tank. There are several methods to do this.
This information is based on our own R&D on 6 X 36 columns and feedback from our clients. In our experience hand packing columns like a beast (i.e. 10# in a 6 x 36) had diminishing returns since unpacking it was also more difficult and time consuming. Consequently, we would pack about 8#’s by hand. Then we thought, if there was a way to unpack the tighter column with the additional material maybe it would be worth the extra effort of getting the 10# in by hand. That’s when we built the first prototype. With getting the additional 2#’s per column in, removing the unpacking labor and almost all the time from the unpacking process, the Iron Fist was already worth it right then and there and was paying itself off quickly. In doing 5 runs per day we were processing an additional 10# per day and unpacking with the push of a button. At a 15% yield, that was an additional 1.5# of end product per day. Our payoff period of 12K was around 6 days at that point! 6… days… If it was 6 months it would have still been worth it.
Pushing further, we proceeded to work on automating the packing portion of the process. That’s when we optimized our set up at 12# per column using the Iron Fist for packing as well as unpacking. We could actually get 16 in at the limits of the machine but at anything beyond 12# we thought our solvent flow times were too long. This is where the 50% additional material that we recommend comes from (12# in when compared to 8# by hand). We do not recommend grinding the material at all but to each there own. In our process, we run our recovery pump while we introduce solvent into the extraction column. We continuously push/pull the solvent through and maintain our pressure differential. We always soak but vary soak times according to the quality of material we’re running. We noticed about a 15% increase in solvent time going from 8# to 12#. This increase has no relevance, at least to us and our current clients anyway, when processing 20# additional per day with our existing equipment. We have not noticed any significant changes in percent yields while still using the same amount of solvent which was already less than most people use. Yes, solvent flow times will increase; however, our increase in production with most of the labor removed? No brainer.
We know this is a new method and there is a lot of uncertainty and hesitation in the community. We want others to experience the same rewards that we have. We don’t expect anyone to fully understand all the benefits without experiencing them first hand. That’s why when we do demos we sometimes leave the unit overnight or we may pack them one day and come back to unpack them the next day. It just depends on how many appointments we have on that demo trip. Then we wait for the call the next morning that usually goes “can you leave your demo unit with us until you build ours, because there’s no way we can go back now”. We’re confident in our packer/unpacker. Let us pack one or more columns, you process them, then we’ll unpack them. Keep track of your percent yields, cycle times, pack/unpack times, additional yield per cycle, etc. From there, extrapolate for pay off period, ROI, yada yada. If for some reason you decide you don’t want it after the demo, no problem, we got to meet and do some cool shit together, win-win!
Our next demo trip is set for April 4th-8th.
