GW is wrong about any number of things, but usually not wildly, primarily because I regularly do what I preach in front of highly critical audiences, some processing professionals, who touch, smell, and taste. What I recommend, is taking from me what works for you, and discarding what doesn't.
When I heated a puddle under 29.5" vacuum, the bubbles didn't start breaking free until about 115F, and so that appears to be the fastest way to get them out of the oil, and pumping the least amount of time, so as to preserve the monoterpenes, which have a boiling pint above 115F, even under the 29.5" vacuum that I recommend.
I've purged to shatter, and then changed the pump oil and purged to wax, to find that the pump oil smelled as good or better than the extract.
The saving grace of course, is that if you leave all the monoterpenes in place, your extract is harsh and not tasty to vaporize, despite its magnificent odor, because in high concentration the monoterpenes are not all palatable and some are expectorants. We strive to leave enough monoterpenes for the material to taste and smell like what it was extracted from, and be pleasant to vaporize.
I of course also regularly recommend that you never, pump to the 25 micron levels achieved with two stage pumps, because the THC boils off at around 30F at that vacuum level. -29.5" Hg is only about 10, 000 microns, so even a 100 micron single stage pump pumps too low.
As far as AI ovens being the way to go, you may be right, but we had to add a marble shelf to ours to hold the temperature dead band that at least our process requires and the very design has its limitations. I see it as more like the cheapest oven that can be made to adequately do the job, if you don't want to rebuild it and add your own controls.
I'll take that you think so as an indication that for starters, you've also never tested a Cascade TEK oven, and a challenge for Skunk Pharm Research and Cascade TEK to turn their already superior oven, into the standard for the professional cannabis industry, so you have little audience for your opinion.
What we've found in experiment at SPR, is that there are any number of ways to process BHO, some better than others, and virtually without fail the owners of the various processes believe theirs is superior.
Furthermore, after judging concentrates in the Seattle cup, it was readily apparent that most of the folks who thought that, were wrong, and some deeply and horribly wrong.
May I offer three thoughts?
The world is full of folks who are damn sure of things that ain't so. Will Rogers
The fish trap exists only because of the fish. If you catch the same fish, how important is the design of the trap? Buddha?
It is good that we don't all have the same tastes, because us men childs would have killed each other off over the same woman long ago. Graywolf