Cleaning hexane oil with ISO

To get the hexane scent/taste out of the oil, can I use isopropyl alcohol to scrub the remaining hexane?

I've read use ethanol. But I only have access to 75% and isoproply would be much cheaper, and easier to redissolve the oil in.

Thanks for any help! Been trying to find something on this but no luck.

Try carbonated water/club soda

We scrub with ethanol, but ostensibly no reason you couldn't use Iso. The hexane leaves with the alcohol.

It will take away the gasoline taste, but it too has a pungent taste, so a good purge is required as well.

If you add a bunch of water, about 5x as much, and bring it close to boiling the extract should become liquid and stirrable, which will wash out water soluble stuff while cooking off the hexane. I guess you would keep it hot until you can't smell hexane. Then you cool it in the fridge and pour off the water. If it's little pieces in the water you gotta use a filter of some kind that you can recover it from. It should mostly clump together though. Might have to let it sit overnight to get it all if it seems emulsified. I guess rather than "close to boiling" I should say "hot enough to liquify the extract", probably around 175 F.

Fadedawg said:

We scrub with ethanol, but ostensibly no reason you couldn't use Iso. The hexane leaves with the alcohol.

It will take away the gasoline taste, but it too has a pungent taste, so a good purge is required as well.

Click to expand...

Thank you, this is what I was thinking.

About the water thing. It's a new thing I'm doing, only tried it once before. I just did a test where I extracted some fresh bud with MEK. Separated the bottom water layer with an eye dropper (this was a very small test), evaporated the MEK from the remainder. A little more water formed from condensation, plus I added some more myself (deionized).

Then I microwaved it for a few seconds until it started boiling, mixed it around and then put it in the freezer until it was cold. I could then scrape the oil from the small glass plate, while under the water, with a dabbing tool with a flattish end. It comes off the glass easily because of the water and I just tried to clump it together as much as possible. I was then able to remove the water with the dropper again and now I'm letting the last of the water dry out in the air.

Worked very well. Got a nice light colored extract. I was squishing the plant material pretty good too, to get all the MEK out. It just doesn't pick up much chlorophyll at all because MEK is only partially soluble in water. It mostly floats. So it can't get to the green leaf oil because the water in the leaf is keeping it out. It's actually a very good solvent for this. Cheap and easy to find, impurities are mostly just acetone and butanol, neither very toxic.

I got about 3% yield from fresh, just the blank leaf trimmed off and the rest stripped by pulling my hand up the stem. Probably about 2.5% when fully dried of water. Still kind of mucous-like at the moment. I stuck it on some parchment (the all paper kind) to help it dry, since water can pass through regular parchment.

Writing this a little later, I dried it by putting the parchment on a coffee warmer, which only gets to 220 F. It bubbled a lot for several minutes and I stirred it as it did. I think it decarbed at the same time as dried, because that was a lot of bubbles. Turned out dark after that. Guess it did pick up some chlorophyll. Maybe if I just swirled it around rather than pressing on it it would be lighter. Anyway, got me something to smoke in a relatively short time. The yield came out to 2% btw, 0.25 g from 12 g fresh material.This type of oil is fairly soft at room temp, like normal weed oil.

Shouldn't be that hard to get rid of the hexane. I use naphtha sometimes and it stinks pretty bad and with stirring while heating in a pie plate over simmering water there's no detectable odor when it's done. Wen it's done I just mix in about 4x by wt dry sift kief to make nice black gummy hash perfect for the hot knives.