gunnaknow
Active member
Thanks, as do you Jump.
You could also just submerge the plant material in water for a few minutes, so long as the bits were of easily strainable size. I eat kelp regularly, which comes as dried leaf shreds and needs just five minutes soaking in water to fully reconstitute. I suspect that cannabis leaf trim would reconstitute very quickly also, although thicker, denser tissue like buds would obviously take longer. One would need to remember not to disturb the submerged material too much or use water that was too cold because both would encourage trichome dislodgment.
Unfortunately, I don't have any bud to work with at the moment Jump.
What is the consistency of your amber after it's been in a warm 15-25°C room for a few hours? What temperature is it usually?
Yes, benzene is often used to redistill the ethanol to 200 proof and trace amounts will remain in the ethanol. One should use ethanol that has been purified by other means, such as by the use of hygroscopic substances like glycerin/glycerol or by the use or molecular sieves, which selectively adsorb water molecules but not ethanol molecules. You can even buy 95-96% ethanol and then purify it at home, by adding a molecular sieve material such as 3A zeolite. If one were planning to recapture the alcohol from the oil for reuse, through distillation, then the alcohol would obviously need to be dessicated each time. As Jump says, it might not be worth the effort but each to their own.
http://www.milehidistilling.com/Zeolite_3A_Ethanol_Dessicant_p/13030.htm
Have you thought about using a pressure cooker? They are built to withstand high pressures, so should also withstand low pressure. They have a pressure outlet fitting on the lid that could easily be adapted to fit tubing from a vacuum pump. Some pressure cookers have a small window in the lid, which would be helpful for observing when the oil had sufficiently reduced. As Jump was getting at before though, if it's ethanol that you're using, it's better to recapture the ethanol through distillation because of the high cost of undenatured ethanol. If it's just IPA then it doesn't matter because it's cheap.
You can distill ethanol whilst it's also under a vacuum, allowing you to recapture the ethanol aswel as reduce the temperature required but you really need to know what you're doing and it's beyond the scope of this thread.
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5462&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
Gunna
... three years are gone...
