I’ve always gone by the notion that heat and duration was a strong-bad. This was a while back but as I recall like 215c for 12 or 13 hours maybe? I never saw a significant change in results. The samples were pulled off of 2nd pass after it had been poured out into masons.
The setup was a Summit SPD-2 legacy head with the key on a 5L SP connected with GL-14 to a 13.1CFM pump protected by a -80c double cold trap. Usually with a 1.5-3kg load.
The wide bore has changed everything in this new rig Im using… thrown everything off… so there’s that too =(
The terps were the same heat but I hung out longer until there was no return and tried to eliminate the crossover between terps and heads. I regulated the vacuum by hand with a valve at the pump to achieve a more or less steady 2000-3000 at the front end and walked the temp up slowly as normal to about 170c. On the next fraction I took a larger heads. For the body and tails I was at about 185-195c and took both the body and tails in the same flask making the cut between them on the second pass. Vac during body and tails was about 200-400 micron. This definitely made a slightly darker first pass and probably as a result a slightly darker 2nd pass.
Using this method Im getting about 90% D9. I want to get higher and still trying to dial it in.
I pour my body into a 2L flask and homogonize for 30 min or so then sample from that. The change to a crap potency is just really weird. My total time in the spd on first pass is less than 4 hours which seems way shorter than many. Im about to do a small run next week, 1600g to see if that knocks my potency back up.
I was trained to actually assemble my spd the day before and pull a full vac to check for any leaks. Next day I just warm my decarbed/de-volatiled oil and it goes in through the thermometer port, allowing me to just plug the thermometer fitting in after and my system is ready to go quickly.
On top of other the other things you’re doing, try to slow down your heat ramping as well. The flasks can get very hot before oil is moving and while it’s ramping.
I do a pretty slow heat ramp, I pull a low vac , around 300torr and slowly heat up to around 70-80 so I can see my oil spinning in the well before I really start to pull a hard vacuum and ramp up the temperatures. In essence I do a good deal of my volatile removal in the short path but it still keeps my well times below 4 hours on my large 3000g runs. Tomorrow I am doing a small 1600g test batch to see if that helps. Really crazy part is before this I was consistently hitting 90s plus thc distillate…total cannabinoids about 97% most times.
