QWEthanol safety !?!

[stroh]

Yes but you are talking about pure butane in an ideal environment, the problem is no matter how filtered the can of butane says it is there are impurities. Also from my understanding butane needs to be in an environment plentiful with oxygen, otherwise it doesn't burn as clean and will leave behind soot and carbon monoxide in addition to the two you have named...although the same is true for ethanol, I wish we had a chemist around to completely straiten this out.

Edit: Didn't realize you meant when boiling butane. How is that practical for us and how does it relate to ethanol or our purposes in hash/oil making at all?

sorry for the late reply, but vector is mostly N-butane, in addition to ISO-butane and propane. check the MSDS, no mention of mercaptans whatsoever. Boiling point = evaporation point, so it is indeed relevant to our purposes. Butane is not especially toxic or detrimental unless inhaled in LARGE amounts, as in sucking on the darned tank haha, though thats not to say one should be careless when purging. low and slow is the way to go, and i take as much time as i can to ensure a quality end product that is free of solvent and quite tasty. As far as solvents go, i do not believe any to be "safer" than another, and like you mentioned, without any actual testing in a controlled setting with expensive equipment, we cannot know for sure whether or not solvent-made concentrates are completely free of impurities, only basing this off my own research and physical senses such as taste, smell, etc.

 

[Darb]

OK, so I have been doing a few ethanol runs. and here is what I heave learned so far.

I have always first done the run with butane(non polar) first, to strip away the best parts of the bud/abv(depending on the run I am talking about) I purge, but I don't worry about it too much because I then dissolve it into the minimum amount of ethanol it takes to do it. I put it in mason jars and shake it like crazy for a bit. then i let it sit and you see a white precipitate suspended in the solution (fats and waxes) I filter the solution 1 or 2 times depending on how I think it looks. and evaporate outside in a hot water bath.

2 oz of ethanol takes about 15 min to evap outside in winter(-5c) conditions. the smell of the vapors coming off are distinctly different at this point. it now smells good instead of like the ethanol does. I let it go an additional 15 minutes or longer just to be safe

after that i took it inside for a 30 minute oven purge at 150C for 30 min. after that scrape and collect.

Quality:

I have done 2 types of source material so far. a whole bunch of bud I had saved up from having done a first wash on. I will talk about this first. the final produce is a taffy like substance. I can handle it with no problems, pull it and it's like putty, yank it and it snaps in shards. a dark colour, and to my surprise it tastes like sensi star! one of the buds I did most of the run with apparently. The hit is very smooth and has a dry finish.

I didn't weigh the initial amount, but it was a "1 oz" tube extractor that i used. and I got 0.8g from it. It was bud that had already been washed with butane once before to make the primo oil, but that stuff was long since gone!

the quality is very nice, and i am surprised it's 2nd wash oil. it tastes better than that.

as for the ABV stuff. I ran about 7 oz and while I haven't weighed it either it looks like about 3 grams of oil to me. the oil is very clean looking while it is quite dark, slicked out on paper it would be yellow though. the smell of it in the pan was of abv (surprise?) the taste though is very smooth again with a toasted nutty flavour. its also very clean but it has a harsher finish than the sensi star batch. this abv stuff is mostly cbd/cbn though and i can really tell the difference between the 2! one get me ripped and feels just like other high thc concentrates. the other gets me feeling very body stoned. I feel incredibly high, yet at the same time calm, and very clear headed. it's pretty amazing actually!

Did you find that the iso step made a huge difference with your bho?

 

[weedemon]

well i never did it with iso after on bho only ever ethanol.

I Have done ethanol extractions on herb before too though. so my comparison is more of a iso vs ethanol comparison. not really talking about using iso to do the same (I don't even know if it will extract the fats the same as ethanol does. I have never tried it. sounds like an experiment to me!)

but for my bho dissolved in ethanol and filtered, I do think it made a pretty big difference. the constancy changed from more runny to a more taffy like consistency, it became much more handleable. it lost some taste too though. you lose a bit of weight in doing this, but you are gaining potency. so who doesn't like that?!

 

[Darb]

I will try with ISO this week and report back...

 

[weedemon]

make sure you give it time to sit once dissolved, to see if anything comes out of the solution. 30 min was long enough for me.

 

[Darb]

I'm going to freeze the solution for 24 hours before I filter....

 

[weedemon]

ok that will be plenty time!

 

[Darb]

Weedemon, this method works perfect with %99 iso.
End result is light brown and see through. No cloudiness.
Smoother tasting and no more throat tickle. (guess I wasn't fully purging before)
This is how a concentrate should turn out! I was very surprised how good mine turned out. Better than some of what I have bought at the dispensarys here in Canada.
Takes 3 or four hours instead of 1 but well worth it.
This will be my method from now on.

What kind and how many coffee filters do you use for filtering?
Are you concerned about how much concentrate seems to be soaked into the filters when you are done?

 

[weedemon]

I usually use 2 or 3 filters. not sure the brand, they are just brown "unbleached" coffee filters. you will loos a little liquid to the filter paper, trip the paper down to minimize absorption. to me the losses are worth it for the filtering.

are you telling me you saw the iso pull out the fats too? you saw a cloudy suspension on before filtering/a creamy sludge removed in the filter?

 

[Darb]

The solution was a little cloudy before filtering but I didn't find much in the way of waxes left in the filter.
I thought maybe they soaked into the filter? Now I'm thinking iso isn't pulling the waxes out.
What kind of ethanol are you using?
Where are you buying it?

 

[weedemon]

it's 80% ethanol that im using. i got it from a pharmacist. they use it for Rx compounding. some does clog up the filter. you probably noticed it took longer to filter as time went on?

you don't have to see a lot for it to work though but i wonder if some solvents are better at it than others.

 

[Darb]

it's 80% ethanol that im using. i got it from a pharmacist. they use it for Rx compounding. some does clog up the filter. you probably noticed it took longer to filter as time went on?

you don't have to see a lot for it to work though but i wonder if some solvents are better at it than others.

Yeah, it's definately filtering something out. There is quite a noticeable difference in quality afterwords.
I think I can get grain alcohol here in Alberta. Maybe I'll give that a try next....