My Anresco results indicate I have 12% moisture on my Rosin samples (along with the sample being 99.8% cannabinoids) and my Live Resin Sauce has 10% moisture… wonder how they are getting those results… I can guarantee there is no water in my hash.
hmmm…I recall being asked to get our cannabis bone dry before testing purposes…so that the numbers would be higher. when testing was required, but 3rd party wasn’t. I refused.
The only way I can see to get a “dry weight” on rosin would be to use 3a mol sieves and weigh what they absorbed. any other attempt at drying would simply evaporate terps. which might be what they did.
so you had 12% terps, and they evaporated that off, leaving 99.8% cannabinoids? nah, still don’t buy it…
Yes. Anresco labs. I don’t personally know them, but I know they are very well trained and experienced with analysis.
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I just heard the same thing today from another party. We will definitely be giving Pure Analytics a try.
Karl Fischer titration can tell you water content without measuring other volatiles like terps
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thank you.
How would I have 12% water content in a sample of BHO? Still confused.
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How dry is your plant? How humid is it there? Do you winterize with ethanol? What kind of temp changes does it see? How much do you trust your lab?
Ive had ethanol crude test at 89.5% and winterized co2 crude at 93% total potential thc. Same lab, won’t name names. I think standards degrading, cutting costs, and taking on more business than they can handle for sure.
seriously, just get your own HPLC. You can pick up 2 generation old models for ~5000$ w/software, last generation is about 12-15K. Either can easily can run a basic a cannabinoid method. You can buy your own standards, and get your own results in 12 minutes. Then when you take it to a public lab for testing, and they give you crazy results, you can just say “Hey, we tested this in house at x, are you sure its y”. Think of all that you can do with it; pre test every batch of flower, post run testing to really understand how much cannabinoid you are throwing out, testing extract at every point in your process. It amazes me that some groups pay 300-500K to set up an extraction operation, but won’t spend anything on analytics. In house HPLC is a game changer. Once you have one you will wonder how you lived with out it.
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Agreed! Get yourself some form of In House analytics
@shinyemulsion can I convince you to post a couple of candidates for older HPLC systems in the above thread?
Edit: here’s one reference for my claim that “inflation” is clearly visible in the public data out of WA.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22755-2
Our analyses revealed clear, systematic differences in the results obtained by different testing facilities in Washington, with some labs consistently reporting higher or lower levels of cannabinoids than others.
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Smartypants 
using the publicly available data…
Funny you should mention Steep Hill, out here in Nevada they were trying to run a testing lab out of someone’s house. I have seen some super shady lab results in Nevada in general. I have seen oil that I have had tested come at 107 % total potency(terpenes + Cannabinoids). Also one of the leaders of the analytical industry Digipath was rubber stamping 30 % plus test results for every strain of flower they tested in Nevada(6 months after the opening of dispensaries). I would say in general Digipath should be avoided along with steep hill. There is a reason the regulators have shut those labs down out here in Nevada.
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Don’t forget the cost of maintenance, calibration, mobile phases, columns, standards, waste disposal, time, space, etc. as a scientist, yes get hplc-dad/ms/fid/whatever, but as a business under a certain size, finding a good lab makes a lot of sense.
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Pretesting flower involves preparing a very clean extract, which is probably where a lot of screwed up results come from. The just shoot it through a little SPE cartridge and blammo! Clear as day, but probably lost a bit there. I wouldn’t recommend testing flower in-house, nor, must I even say, edibles. You need to get pretty creative if you really want accurate results.
The only way to get a representative sample of flower is to finely grind and mix the whole lot and extract a large enough sample of that. Nobody wants to do that, so we get test results that are really + / - 10%. Maybe a little better than the first hit of the day test, but if you calibrated your pipe, lungs, and head well enough you might be able to do better.
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using my GC/FID I’ve surveyed quite a bit of flower. and I agree it’s variable.
I’ve also solicited the same strain from our three principles, grown in different rooms at different locations. and the three buds they gave me tested at 27 +/- 0.4%.
That number might really have been 22% if done by my favorite 3rd party lab.
Same strain, I handed a trimmer a branch, and got back buds testing between 25% and 9%. based on where they were on the branch.
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Total cannabinoids or THC? The +/- .4% between facilities is impressive. I’m guessing they are all tops. Either you got lucky or you have everything from plants to GC locked down perfectly.
How often do you run your thc standard? Do you purchase it? How often do you prepare it? Do you store it in the freezer? Standard degradation or moisture contamination = inflated results.