Dry Ice?

I've never heard of this. Are we talking bubble hash using dry ice or some alternative solvent extraction technique?

 

why are asking if you act like you know it works?

 

Oh so like dry ice wrapped around the extractor? Seems like it could potentially make it easier for the trichomes themselves to break off of the bud, increasing yield but by introducing additional plant matter into the finished product. Some people freeze their buds before extracting so I guess its a similar principal but it seems like it may be more useful for iso hash where you have to keep the material cold for optimum results. Plust butane is so cold once it gets sprayed that you already have to wear oven mitts to handle the tube so additional coldness may not do much.

Thats just my take though, if you think it might increase yield than by all means go for it!

 

Well cold does make the trich heads more brittle, which in turn makes them easier to break off which usually means less impurities in your oil. Ive never heard of actually using dry ice in a bho extraction, im not sure if you mean combining the dry ice with your product in the tube? I wouldnt recommend it, but hey you saw it on the interwebs so it must work right?
I have however heard of immediately freezing your fresh buds/trim right after harvest, and then running the product whiles it still cold and fresh. Ive heard many times that fresh buds are supposed to make the best bho, usually not dried or cured. Though i personally have never done this, i always use dry & cured nug, but my next harvest i plan to run some fresh nug and see if i notice a difference.

 

Actually butane extracts the cannabinoids out of the trichomes leaving them for the most part intact on the bud, if they break off and combine with the finished product you would actually end up with a less pure product, hence my skepticism.

Please report back on how the fresh nug run goes! I've been curious about this too especially now that I have access to uncured bud. I've heard that too, the general consensus in the bho megathread in the harvesting section seems to still be dried cured buds but I think that's mainly because not many people have tried it with fresh material.

 

Ah yes your prob right about that, you would only want brittle trichs in water hash/dry sift i guess, Butane just seems to strip through them(was a lil dabbed out this morning before class) But yeah in retrospect i dont think there would be much difference with butane coming out so cold, but hey idk, dry ice is over -100 F, so its possible i guess...
And will def report in the bho tread in harv/processing about the dif. Was planning a side by side comparison of fresh buds and then dried/cured nug a month or so later, using exact same methods for each run; heat, vac,type of butane, tightness of pack, etc. Itll be just like my science fair projects in middle school Im prob about 6-7 weeks from harvest, but a buddy of mine has a huge crop of headband thatll be cut in a week or so, and ive already agreed to help trim for the weekend in exchange for a very fair amount of buds, so i might be running fresh headband soon

 

Bad, bad idea. Fresh buds have a lot water and butane is very cold; this means ice, which will clog the tube. Running fresh bud/trim exponentially increases your chance of a blowout. Only acceptable way to extract fresh, is with the soak method. You don't want be the dumbass who blows himself up.

On another note, fresh buds make incredible bubble hash.

Dry ice is really only useful for dry sifting or supplementing wet ice in bubble bags.

 

Well i have blown a glass extractor in the past, so i wouldnt put anything past me . I was running dry/cured nug but anyway wasnt all that powerfull at all really, but it still scared me enough to have a stainless steel tube made for me by a buddy. A local caregiver posted a bunch of info on a blog about his techniques and he showed us his ss extractor called the "trident" which was three ~12 in. tubes connected to another ~12 in. tube, each tube held a oz.(in the shape of a trident, and would put a can of tane into each tube cept for the bottom one), and i basically copied his design just for personal amounts, one 1/4-10 G & recently a 20-25 G tube. Lil of topic i know, but those things are so damn strong i dont see the pressure from a can of tane ever blowing it up...but hey idk it could happen, it'd have to be so damn powerful i might no be around to post about it ..lmao ill be sure to pack em somewhat loose. Have you had this happen/heard about it before or something? Or are you just speculating about the combo of freezing cold tane and moist buds mixing? Either way i appreciate your concern but if its just speculation then..it is what it is, and im just trying to do a lil exploration in different ways to make bho. Ive seen a lot of speculation in the iso threads about fresh vs dry possibly affected the consistency, so i was curious about bho. But if you have experience or have heard about this please educate me. The buds would be frozen prior to extracting for atleast 12-24 hours btw.

 

running fresh buds is a bad idea. i know people that have done it before. it could end well but three things are more likely to happen. 1. the tube explodes like a bomb because it becomes sealed off by the bud freezing into ice and plugging it. 2. the bud freezes into ice when you spray, pressure builds up and you get a blow out out the bottom ruining your run. 3. you spray the bud. which has moisture in it. it goes fine but now you have a small amount of water in your product... not good. this is why people dehydrate their bud before running it. I used to grow and experimented with running it in different stages of its life cycle. i also researched A LOT for the best time to run and found that the best way and most of my friends who tried similar experiments all found the same was to run after drying the bud, but before curing it.

 

running fresh buds or putting your buds anywhere near dry ice before a BHO run is a very bad idea. me and my buddy have taken fresh stuff, left it in the freezer for a couple hours and then run it for oil, and it just doesnt work great. you never get good yield and always need a second run, and when you add those 2 together you still get less oil then if you would have dried it first.
using dry ice causes the same problem, the moisture stays in the plant matter unless you can keep the dry ice completely separate from it. like surrounding the extractor with dry ice while running the butane through it would prob work well, but trying to freeze dry it by wrapping your bud in a cloth and tossing it in a bucket of dry ice does not.

 

Sounds more dangerous that it should be. Look on google for absolute amber. It is a thread on another forum about BHO and Ethanol extractions. Basically the guy would accomplish what you are talking about by putting his unused cans of butane in the freezer prior to use. For the extraction vessel he would use an old school glass thermos that was also frozen prior to use. He would put all the buds and such in the thermos and squirt the butane into the thermos through one of two small holes drilled into the lid. This would allow the butane to essentially soak the buds for up to an hour instead of the traditional squirt through gravity pull extraction method. Doing this also seeps more shit out of the buds. Butane is non-polar and would extract not only the non polar cannabinoids but also waxes, fats, lipids, and possibly chlorophyll from the material. This is were Ethanol comes into play. Once you purge the butane mix you dissolve the resulting goop into ethanol. You then freeze the ethanol liquid and 4 hours later strain the mix through paper coffee filters into a extraction vessel. The vessel is cooked over steam until only a clear amber that turns to glass at room temp remains.


Kudos to you if you read that paragraph. Hopefully it helps.


To answer your question, yes I am sure it would increase yield. It would also decrease the quality of the extract due to contaminants that leached from the material due to the increased exposure time to butane. This is where your secondary extract method comes into play. You will probably end up with a bit less product but it will be more potent. Taste and flavor are speculative so I will not speculate.