I apologize for not posting sooner. Been pretty busy over here. So we did some studies and came up with this: terp strip was too hot and our feed rate was too slow. We literally doubled down on the feed rate and cut down our evaporator temp to 135C and it started to run as expected again. Another thing we didnt do correct was using the silica gel. We didnt create the bed good enough on our PIG filter and didnt wash beforehand to get the small dust particles out. So when we did our first THC pass, evaporator temp being 150C, the small silica gel particles heated up and glued themselves to the wall of the still. So it created our rollers to not have good smooth contact. (I’ll post photos below with the first being the THC pass and us getting dark, shitty distillate… the next photo will be after we cleaned the whole system and ran again to “fix” the problem). What a mess and long ordeal but worth the knowledge. We cleaned the system by first passing 500ml vegetable oil at a slow feed rate and at evaporator temp 130C, condenser temp at 30C, and residue & feed tank at 70C. After all that ran through, we changed our parameters to evaporator temp of 50C, condenser temp to 10C, and feed/residue to 50C, and ran Xylene 1000ml through. And third, we kept the parameters the same and just changed the feed rate to fast and ran 1000ml of IPA through. It worked great! We took the system apart to check and it was hella clean. (Photos) and the catch hopper did show a lining of silica. so happy and we will never make that mistake again. Haha cheers
