First QWISO runs ever - Open to criticism & commentary

Album is here: http://imgur.com/a/WaOMg

So here's how I did it:

7 grams of high quality bud, mason jar, 99% iso, (shitty) coffee filters and a gold mesh coffee filter as well.

Froze the mason jar, bud, and 99% iso in the freezer for 6 hours or so.

1st run: lightly swirled the plant matter for about 10 seconds total time submerged. Then filtered into first dish and put the bud back into the jar.

2nd run: full shake for about 25 seconds. Again, filtered and put the plant matter back into the jar.

3rd run: hard swirl for about 20 seconds or a bit more. Filtered and done!

I purged it naturally for the most part. I put some warm/hot water in a vessel below it at the beginning as it was purging outside, but the heat didn't retain very long. It was usually cold water again by 20 mins or so.

To be honest, I didn't have high hopes at it was my first time. A lot of it came out to a powdery consistency, not sure what that's about....

Please pass on any tips or let me know if i've made some big mistakes. Again, just trying to wrap my head around the whole process. I'll update with how it does in my oil pen later. Thanks all!

Update - I threw it in the oven for an additional purge/melt period

I only went for 170 degrees or so. Should I go higher and hope it melts more?

Looks pretty good. Powdery happens when scrapping qwiso off glass, a little heat can take care of that, but you seem to have already figured this out.

Just one question, when you purged outside was it in direct sun light? You wanna make sure its in the shade, direct sunlight will degrade thc. For butane its less of a problem since it purges fairly fast, but Iso takes a while. The cannabinoids are much more exposed after extraction, so the uv exposure can have a lot more effect than on buds.

Yea, I did it under my back deck, so it was generally pretty dark. Also, it was left overnight, so never any sunlight to be had. Next time I think i'll throw the dish in the oven at the end and let the powder melt before scraping i guess...

looks good, how did it dab?--strike that now that I read the entire original post

how much did you end up getting back? Looks like a decent return too

i'm gonna jack a scale from work that will count 0.1g at a time, so i'll find out.

The first dab went well, second one lit on fire....what does that mean? It was a less 'oily' dab; more of the 'waxy' part rather than the clear. It seems like it has more of a propensity to just flare up.

Does that mean I should purge it more?

That's probably a sign that its under purged, if it sparks or crackles then its definitely under purged. I've never seen a dab go up in flames

In my experience it'll be more shatter-ish if you don't heat the liquid qwiso enough. I double boil immediately following the extraction and i get a golden oil. However I theorize that the steam from the double plays a role in turning it into an oil as well. I haven't tested my theory by evaporating in the oven. I heat mine between 160 and 180 degrees Fahrenheit, never more because I don't want to vaporize any of the goods in the oil. Although I have seen people double boil at water temperatures of 220 degrees and the oil was every bit as potent as mine, just less of a smell.

Did you heat after or before you air evaporated? When I heat after I air evap I still get shatter, but when I heat it when the dish is still full of iso I get a more oily product. This is why I think that the consistency is changed by the heat and the steam like I mentioned earlier. Just keep playing around with it. You can always redissolve that try different methods of evaporation.

I air evaporated first with only a slight steam bath below it (it was kinda chilly, outside, and the water in the vessel below would cool pretty quick (10-15 mins)). Once it was fully scraped, I put it in the oven for 15 mins or so at 170 degrees or so, and it came together just a bit more (see my update pic vs the scraped pics in the gallery).

The parts of the oil that have an oil look to it (clear instead of cloudy) seem to heat okay. I didn't see much sparking or crackling, but instead the dab would expand/melt a little but then just catch on fire and burn off the outside of the more waxy stuff. I'm thinking it was under purged, to be honest... it was air evaporated for the most part in chilly weather outside. Maybe I needed to bring more heat to the party

Is it okay to just redissolve in ISO again, refilter, do the purge again (maybe with more heat?) and scrape it back up?

When I put it in my oil pen, it would not fully melt either until it was directly on the coil or directly in the flame. It kinda melted but stayed in chunk form, as opposed to my reclaim oil which fully melts when I drop it in...

What would make QWISO not melt very well?

Okay, some updates:

I threw all 3 runs back in the oven to see if they would purge a bit more. Run #1 fully melted. Run #2 half melted, with the other half being a wax-like substance that does not melt or go clear. Run #3 was almost all the wax-like type. I'll upload a picture when I can. I'm thinking maybe it has to do with my return; the first half seems to have come out as oil while the 2nd half came out like a wax. I've tried throwing a little of run #3 into my oil pen and it does vape, it just needs to be coerced close enough to the coil to make it happen.

Also, I took the aforementioned scale and weighed it up. Run #1 came out to about 0.15-0.2g. Run #2 came out to 0.9g or so. Run #3 came to about 0.3-0.4 or so. Total return was about 1.4g total from 7g of material.

Any or all info or insight is welcome!

Quick edit: I turned up the oven to 190 or so and just checked on it and both run #2 and #3 have started to bubble up like little hills. Does that mean it was underpurged? I'll put up a pic when i can.

Closeups of each run after the 190 degree oven heat treatment:

Run #1 - http://i.imgur.com/Ntghp89.jpg
Run #2 - http://i.imgur.com/vSFEI4G.jpg
Run #3 - http://i.imgur.com/nSkcQJl.jpg

UPDATE:

So I figured I did something wrong, so I redissolved the 'waxy' parts to experiment. I left the good looking oil parts alone.

After redissolving, straining with more care, and purging over gentle heat, the product looks MUCH better! You can see the finished product here:



Total weight is about 1.5 grams or so! The darkest one on the bottom is actually the first run, but I didn't dissolve that one. I almost think I should now, considering the 2nd and 3rd now look lighter in hue...

Congratulations on that good return. I'd go ahead and dissolve and filter that first batch too. Was it plant matter in the oil or did it pick up particulates from being outside? Hell it'll pick up things inside if you aren't fast enough or careful with it. Plant material, dust, outside pollen, etcetera could have attributed to the dabs flaming up. I've seen my qwiso bubble up when heated after its been scraped but I always assumed it was water or air trapped in the oil, not leftover iso. Although it could be I suppose.

Regardless that qwiso looks damn good for your first try.

Bubbling from heat is just the errl decarboxilizing, the carboxyl group breaking off into carbon oxides (and water I think?).

Thanks, that would make sense because thats what happens when oil is dropped on a hot nail.

Yea, I think you're bang on with that, z9. A combination of bad straining, too much purging time outside, and probably some other unknown factors seemed to have got the best of me! Glad I figured it out tho; as usual, just required a little more care & attention.

I think i'll take your advice and redissolve the first run too. It should be the tastiest of the bunch! All of it melts quite nicely now, so I am happy. Now to work on my rinse/wash tek and try to play with it...

Any particular reason as to why you're not doing BHO as opposed to QWISO? If the intent is concentrates to vaporize, I prefer BHO (but that's just me). I did for a while make QWISO that came out pretty decent, but I find that my second-attempt BHO was much cleaner than my QWISO's.

I haven't taken the BHO plunge yet as i'm still just a little intimidated by the safety aspect (which I know also exists with QWISO) but mostly I just haven't gotten the equipment and gathered the balls to do it.

My biggest stopping block is doing a decent purge on BHO. With ISO, I know I can just leave it out if worse comes to worse, or just use really gentle heat to make it evap and scrape it up. Every time I read a BHO tutorial, they talk about vacuum purges, popping bubble, whipping things, and all sorts of other things that make little to no sense to me and just gives me the feeling that there are many, many ways I could really mess up. So familiarity also comes into play I guess...

As far as the safety aspect, I have a small child, and dodging fumes/skin contact seems like a higher personal risk instead of the "honey I blew up the garage" type of mistake Butane could bring to the rest of my family... I already use ISO to soak my solo stems for the reclaim, so doing some QWISO seemed not too great a stretch for me.

I do want to try BHO eventually tho... aren't returns a bit lower than QWISO tho? Or do I have that backwards? It seems that 2-3 ISO washes would be hard to beat in terms of quantity....

I should mention too that i'm not a full on 'dabber'. I originally got an oil pen as a way to use my solo stem reclaim, but I liked the delivery method so much that I started looking into concentrates. Getting the most out of my financial investment is somewhat important to me, so I was always adverse to extracts because I was afraid to screw it up, but after a successful run i'm actually really surprised at the efficiency of concentrates. The key is acknowledging the quality over quantity part. With a good oil, you only need 1-2 hits I find Plus I decarbed my leftovers from the ISO wash and threw it in with my AVB coconut oil, so hopefully i'll get a little more mileage outta that too

Quantity does NOT equal quality! The results of BHO are purer, and so you'd need less to achieve the same effects.

Don't do solvent extracts indoors! Garage is a bad place to do it. GO OUTSIDE!

Vacuums are good at purging the butane because they lower the boiling/evap temp of butane due to differing pressures (hence the vacuuming.) Whipping is done to make it change physical form from an oil/shatter to wax/budder (easier to handle, oxidizes faster.) Bubbles are the butane purging for the most part, some of the more volatile cannabinoids degrade and also cause (smaller) bubbles.

I agree it's intimidating the first time, but it only took me one run (with a mason jar of all things!) to change my mind. Bought a stainless steel turkey baster for a couple of bucks soon after and did my first successful "real" run shortly after. Couldn't have been happier with my results.

Don't worry; I do it all outside!

I will have to think about making the change to BHO. I am just getting started after all!
Thanks for the response

I feel like if you have a vacuum BHO is the way to go. but if you don't ISO will be a cleaner product in the end. You just have to keep everything frozen and not soak for very long.

BHO tip: if you add a little alcohol to the pan you are blasting into, it all kind of dissolves together and stays liquid enough to make butane purging easy.

When the butane is gone i add more ethanol and winterize it. Once you see the volume of white creamy wax that it removes, you won't want to hot-knife (quarts, ti exc.) unrefined again.

on the other hand, all that purging kills off the flavor. and i would rather use some tasty concentrate in a standard vape, either with a cotton ball or smeared into some herb. those waxes won't vaporize, just remain in the abv, and you keep all the taste.

cotton scares me for some reason =( i know its got a high combustion rate but still aghhh

Me too. I cover my stems in oil for use in the vape. It seems like I get endless thick vapor clouds from a bowl with weed and oil covered stems. In fact. I'm about to pack one up.

I have a question about BHO extraction: Is there a fail safe way of purging without a vacuum set up or access to much more than a warm plate (more specifically, a slow cooker with near boiling water in it underneath a pyrex acting as a lid)? I do want to try BHO, but I don't really want to invest too much into a purging set up (as my slow cooker purging set up is now working great for my ISO reclaims)... Can time be used to my advantage if I'm willing to draw out the process?

@oneinfinitecreator It can be done using exclusively a griddle. I know there's a guy trichometechnicians who does all his this way. I don't know if I'd call anything about extracting fail safe, but this can be consistently done if you monitor your temps closely. Temp will vary slightly whether you use parchment or slick pad (they absorb different amounts of heat) so take that into consideration. The ideal temperature is somewhere between 110 and 170 degrees. This is some I did myself on a Presto griddle (30 bucks at Target).



I still consider the vacuum investment well worth it. Vacuum purging with low heat in my experience just makes clean, great tasting errl every time it's done right. Either way definitely a good idea to do some more reading to get an understanding of the process!

A good source of information on starter vacuum setups is CyberReload on youtube. I modeled my setup after his, it cost me about 50 dollars and works great.