Breakover
Member
Has anyone tried using acetone for the winterizing solvent? We've been experimenting with it using our lab grade acetone, and the waxes seem to drop out quicker (3-4 hrs in the deep freeze), and evaporating the acetone off is also pretty quick (a couple hours for a zip of oil using vac assist, sonication, and heat) compared to using 99% ISO or hard to find 95% Etoh. If we can distill off the acetone and recover it for re-use, it makes using lab grade acetone pretty economical. Acetone has a lower bp and higher vapor pressure than either ISO or EtOH, and we check for residual acetone by pulling a high vac under gentle heat and checking the exhaust of our vac pump with a snap-on combustible gas detector.
We've also found that sonication of the winterized extract solution helps with purging the solvent, especially when applying a vacuum. All we're using is a 60W ultrasonic cleaner off ebay right now that is normally used in the lab to prepare a sample for chromatography. We will be upgrading our process sonicator to a model that has both heat and sonication controls so we have better control over the temp, as the sonicator we have now lacks heat control, even though it does get the water hot enough to boil acetone after running for about 30 minutes.
My only concern is that we're leaving cannabinoids behind along with the nonpolar waxes. I guess I need to fire up the GC and run some samples out of our used filters.
any thoughts, reservations, comments?
We've also found that sonication of the winterized extract solution helps with purging the solvent, especially when applying a vacuum. All we're using is a 60W ultrasonic cleaner off ebay right now that is normally used in the lab to prepare a sample for chromatography. We will be upgrading our process sonicator to a model that has both heat and sonication controls so we have better control over the temp, as the sonicator we have now lacks heat control, even though it does get the water hot enough to boil acetone after running for about 30 minutes.
My only concern is that we're leaving cannabinoids behind along with the nonpolar waxes. I guess I need to fire up the GC and run some samples out of our used filters.
any thoughts, reservations, comments?