bubble machine questions

I'm getting conflicting information/advice/techniques, as usual. Two things I'm wondering:

1. how much material should I process per run in a 5 gallon machine (by wet weight or volume)?
2. if I'm working with complete buds fresh frozen, should I break them up? if so, how? and how much?

For the first question, I have about 5 lbs. of wet-weight bud to run (probably 1.25 lbs. if it were dry), I'm trying to figure out how many cycles I'll need to do. And the second question -- I'm assuming I should not cut it up, because that would just put more chlorophyll into the water? They were frozen as whole buds, so I'm not sure what to do next.

This all came about last minute because I had a few good sized plants in my outdoor start to have issues, so I had to take them down early. The trichomes are still about half clear, so the bud would be weak to smoke but I thought making hash would be worthwhile (this is not for resale). For better or worse, I picked up one of the less expensive 5 gallon bubble machines from Amazon. I've tried to sit through some instructional YouTube videos... but as usual, hours later I don't have the answers to my questions. Any help would be appreciated.

I haven't made bubble hash but I know how it work so I'll try to give some general advice, take it for what it's worth, which may be nothing.

I would crush the stuff up a fair amount after getting rid of the big stalks. So what if Chlorophyll is exposed? There's no solvent involved so it can't get in anything. You don't want to crush it to powder which would fit through the screens, but I doubt it would get that small anyway. From my understanding, vegetative material will float and trichs will sink, so it shouldn't be too hard to separate the two after the filtering by putting it in a container with water. BTW, I recommend using deionized or distilled water rather than tap water, which often contains calcium and other alkaline minerals which may react with THCA making it water soluble and washing it out. If you have to use tap water I would acidify it slightly with citric acid or some other weak and fairly safe acid first. It's good for killing fungi too, so fringe benefit there.

BobCajun said:

I haven't made bubble hash but I know how it work so I'll try to give some general advice, take it for what it's worth, which may be nothing.

I would crush the stuff up a fair amount after getting rid of the big stalks. So what if Chlorophyll is exposed? There's no solvent involved so it can't get in anything. You don't want to crush it to powder which would fit through the screens, but I doubt it would get that small anyway. From my understanding, vegetative material will float and trichs will sink, so it shouldn't be too hard to separate the two after the filtering by putting it in a container with water. BTW, I recommend using deionized or distilled water rather than tap water, which often contains calcium and other alkaline minerals which may react with THCA making it water soluble and washing it out. If you have to use tap water I would acidify it slightly with citric acid or some other weak and fairly safe acid first. It's good for killing fungi too, so fringe benefit there.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the response. I've heard that using store bought ice and tap water are not good, but hadn't heard why before. That said... it looks like I have enough bud to run at least a half dozen bags through... that's going to be a lot of time. I don't have the capacity to make that much ice from distilled water (in trays?). So my method and my end result will be imperfect, but the truth is I'd be composting all this bud if this option didn't exist. This is a hail mary of sorts. Thanks again for taking the time to respond.