If you are looking to compound on a bigger scale. Need equipment with high throughput requirements, ethanol processing equipment will be your first choice. While previous styles of processing, such as using C02 processing equipment, requires post processing with cryogenic ethanol. The most recent standard operating procedures for large scale ethanol processing use cryogenic ethanol as the primary processing solvent has created the ability to filter fats and lipids out of your product inline using a filtration skid for processing.
The end goal of using ethanol processing equipment is usually creating a crude oil. Distillate, or isolating down to an isolate with other solvents after distillation. Our 30 gallon centrifuge can compound about 25lbs of biomass in a 20 min period. This throughput makes harvesting and processing a large farm easy. Our ethanol processing equipment are set up with a modular design, allowing clients to expand their processing capabilities with ease. Therefore, some of our clients process 3 shifts a day, with two CCE30 processing centrifuges, inline filtration, in addition to our decarboxylation equipment and run over 20,000lbs a day of biomass with our ethanol processing equipment.
It is important to decide if purchasing ethanol processing equipment should be in your initial investment. If the goal of your company, brand, and farm is small batch cultivation. Or your company is looking to create higher quality full spectrum compounds…butane processing equipment will likely be your first choice. Butane processing equipment will have a much lower throughput. Shouldn’t be used for a very large harvest or if the end goal is purely distillation. However, when processing with butane processing equipment clients will get the full spectrum high quality compound products such as shatter, crumble, sauce, diamonds, etc. Whereas with cryogenic ethanol processing, the highly desired aromatic volatile compounds are normally lost. The product is normally distilled to a product that is not full spectrum.
C02 VS Ethanol Processing: We get this question a lot. Is ethanol processing better than C02 processing? The answer is YES! However, using ethanol as a primary solvent eliminates a post processing procedure used in C02 processing called “winterization”. Therefore, when using a C02 processing machine, a client will have to crash fats and lipids with ethanol after processing. This normally takes 24 hours of chilling the oil and solvent mixtures. The most recent processing designs use ethanol as the primary processing solvent. Allows us to prechill the solvent prior to compounding and filter plant fats and lipids directly inline after our C1D2 30g centrifuge.
It is very important to consider safety when using ethanol as your primary processing solvent. Always compound inside a C1D2 processing room (C1D1 also meets this requirement) that has the proper ventilation, electrical standards of class 1 division 2, and has the engineering certifications required to show full compliance to NFPA and state code. In addition, all of your equipment should have either an engineer peer review or a UL listing as well. This certification process is one of our services if you’d like to certify a custom processing machine. However, another consideration should be maximum allowed quantities of solvent in an processing facility. Therefore, most processing facilities will have a PE fire protection engineer work with the design team to create a hazard analysis. Covers equipment certifications, MAQs (maximum allowed quantities of solvent), and classified areas with solvent in-use and in-storage. C1D1 Labs has done this for many clients all over the world. Furthermore, please contact us if you have any questions on the safety of your processing facility, this is our specialty.
