[dongle]

I have a couple hundred pounds of old material (untrimmed buds) that I would like to salvage into distillate. Which solvent/method would be the most economical for a quick, easy extraction?

To start off, I do not have easy access to a CLS. I have a small rotovap, however, for solvent recovery.

I was originally thinking of using a zippered mesh bag, and 7 gallon FG buckets filled with ethanol and dry ice to extract.

However I'm wondering if a different solvent such as hexane (~$150/5gal), pentane (~$200/5gal) or heptane (~$150/5gal IIRC) might be a better choice. Would those solvents require chilling in order to prevent pick up of extra unwanted lipids and others like chlorophyll? Or would room temperature suffice?

I'm curious if a room-temp ethanol wash with post-extraction carbon filtration would be more economical? Or would a cooling the ethanol in a standard non-cryo chest freezer be enough, or do I really need dry ice temperatures?

[dongle]

Ethanol costs me roughly $350/5gal, FWIW.

I was thinking of filling two 7 gallon buckets with ethanol, drop in some dry ice, and put into chest freezer. Drop in zippered mesh bag with plant material, soak/stir maybe 5-15 minutes in the first bucket. Pull out mesh bag from first bucket, gravity drain most over the first bucket, and rinse in the 2nd bucket.

I imagine this method will waste a decent amount of solvent trapped in the plant material from the rinse bucket.

[SkyHighLer]

If you want to keep it simple like you suggested above, use pentane. It boils off at the lowest boiling point, is the least toxic of the hydrocarbons next to butane and propane, and is highly non-polar (follow my link below,) you could extract at room temperature and literally wring the bag out and still have decent product.

[Chunkypigs]

start with ice water hash and save yourself some solvents.

[WaterFarmFan]

The most economical method would be finding a process that uses a smaller amount of material (and thus less solvent which can be reclaimed and reused) and that you can do repeatedly for weeks, instead of big and expensive equipment to process large quantities in a short time. You either spend lots of money or spend lots of time...

I find that vacuum filtration does a really good job about getting max yield. Once the material in funnel stops dripping solvent, I pour another volume or two of fresh -50C ethanol over the top, until only clean solvent flows, indicating no more good stuff to catch.

Also, pulverizing material using sub-zero temps makes it easier to get max yield in a single pass and easier to filter all of your solvent from soaked material.