If you are looking to extract on a bigger scale and need equipment with high throughput requirements, ethanol extraction equipment will be your first choice. While previous styles of extraction, such as using C02 extraction equipment, requires post processing with cryogenic ethanol. The most recent standard operating procedures for large scale ethanol extraction use cryogenic ethanol as the primary extraction solvent has created the ability to filter fats and lipids out of your product inline using a filtration skid for extraction.
The end goal of using ethanol extraction equipment is usually creating a crude oil, distillate, or isolating down to an isolate with other solvents after distillation. Our 30 gallon centrifuge can extract about 25lbs of biomass in a 20 min period. This throughput makes harvesting and processing a large farm easy. Our ethanol extraction equipment are set up with a modular design, allowing clients to expand their processing capabilities with ease. Some of our clients process 3 shifts a day, with two CCE30 extraction centrifuges, inline filtration, in addition to our decarboxylation equipment and run over 20,000lbs a day of biomass with our ethanol extraction equipment.
It is important to decide if purchasing ethanol extraction 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 extracts…butane extraction equipment will likely be your first choice. Butane extraction equipment will have a much lower throughput and shouldn’t be used for a very large harvest or if the end goal is purely distillation. However, when processing with butane extraction equipment clients will get the full spectrum high quality extract products such as shatter, crumble, sauce, diamonds, etc. Whereas with cryogenic ethanol extraction, the highly desired terpenes are normally lost and the product is normally distilled to a product that is not full spectrum.
C02 VS Ethanol Extraction: We get this question a lot. Is ethanol extraction better than C02 extraction? The answer is YES! Using ethanol as a primary solvent eliminates a post processing procedure used in C02 extraction called “winterization”. When using a C02 extraction machine, a client will have to crash fats and lipids with ethanol after extraction. This normally takes 24 hours of chilling the oil and solvent mixtures. The most recent extraction designs use ethanol as the primary extraction solvent and allows us to prechill the solvent prior to extracting 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 extraction solvent. Always extract inside a C1D2 extraction 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 extraction machine. Another consideration should be maximum allowed quantities of solvent in an extraction facility. Most extraction facilities will have a PE fire protection engineer work with the design team to create a hazard analysis that 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. Please contact us if you have any questions on the safety of your extraction facility, this is our specialty.