So I have just about every piece of gear in my home lab to do extraction with hexane. Understand that I’m talking about a fume containment that vents outside along with a full face respirator in case of splashes. I can do all of my handling and rotovaping in the containment. It is not a solvent to use lightly. You have essentially all the same dangers involved from using butane with additional issues of toxicity and a significantly harder purge.
The one thing I still need to set up is venting pipes for my vacuum pumps so they don’t blow off inside. And yes pumps plural because you need very light vacuum to run filter and recovery but a harder vacuum to do purge. Even with all my ventilation precautions, I’ll still be doing all the open handling at -25F to reduce the vapor pressure and give a better fire safety margin.
I strongly suggest that given where you are in your journey that you stick with QWET and an easy To use recovery tool like the extract craft. You can always sell it if you move onto a rotovap. If you stick with your simple distillation then running vapor through a copper tubing coil with a fan across it will do ok. Particularly outside given the temps this time of year. It will take a long damn time to get your ethanol boiled off though but you will probably get back a decent percentage.
You can dry the ethanol back to 200 proof by adding anhydrous magnesium sulfate until it swirls around like a snow globe and then filtering it out. You can recover the mgso4 by baking it if you feel like. It is cheap though and if you just let the residual ethanol evaporate off, it is jus epsom salt so you can put it on your plants.
ExtractCraft The
Source Turbo Extractor The
Source Turbo is an easy to use, at home appliance for extracting plant essences. Plant essences are key to the smell, taste, and other properties of plants and are used in flavorings, perfumes, herbal extracts, and medicinals. The first step in making...
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You are looking at something with a mantle for heating… You know that a short path distillation is not for solvent recovery right?
-Eskander