Hi everybody, I'm rather new to the site, I mean I've been here a while but I just now started to toss around ideas, successes i've experienced personally and try to obtain insight regarding lingering questions . Today's subject matter revolves around the material of the containers throughout the process. I'm very very clear that avoiding plastics is in your best interest unless you are informed of which plastics can handle the situations that they would be in. I've seemed to comfortably settle into a straight to base routine and I'm doing indescribably well of from what I hear LOL. I surely think the same thing myself, but I've been having a hell of a time dealing with the sizable amount of root that I'm processing and recently I've invested in a 4 gallon mason jar that was fairly expensive, extremely fragile and shattered when moved, cautiously mind you and created quite a messy disappointment to say the least. This container that I speak of I only utilize during the first one or 2/3 of the process and then everything gets separated off into other more manageable vessels that I find work ideally for me. I'd like to know if it's okay if I begin my straight to base process in a metal container or if that's a no-no. If anybody could give me some insight on that it would be greatly appreciated. And I thank all of you for your contributions!!
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Metal vessels
- Thread starter mql2024
- Start date
fractals4life
Titanium Teammate
Depends on the metal ... Aluminium is right out as it will react quite vigorously with a strong base to give off hydrogen.
Food grade stainless steel should be ok though, as far as I know.
just as metal isn't just "metal" so with glass: you want to find borosilicate glass vessels as they withstand thermal shock much better and are generally stronger. The normal sort of glass is known as "soda glass" and will slowly weaken under exposure to a strong base, as well as having a relatively large coefficient of thermal expansion which means it can't take thermal shock very well.
Food grade stainless steel should be ok though, as far as I know.
just as metal isn't just "metal" so with glass: you want to find borosilicate glass vessels as they withstand thermal shock much better and are generally stronger. The normal sort of glass is known as "soda glass" and will slowly weaken under exposure to a strong base, as well as having a relatively large coefficient of thermal expansion which means it can't take thermal shock very well.
Way back when in my pre-Nexus days I had a one gallon sweet (candy) jar pop its bottom off due to my incompetent application of a heat bath. What saved the day was having a large stainless steel stew pot as the water bath. This was - very fortunately - large enough to contain the extraction, so I just carried on with the pulls straight out of the pot once I'd removed the broken jar. I think the cracked-off base of the jar remained in the extraction, since that would have been too messy and inconvenient to fish out.
So, as you probably now realise, having suitable secondary containment for your corrosive, flammable sludge in the event of failure of the extraction vessel is something of a must. Also, we would consider a four gallon extraction to be excessively large anyhow:
Attitude Page#No commercial-scaled extractions and reckless "spreading".
Not saying this what you were actually intending, but consider at least that four smaller, concurrent extractions are likely to be easier to handle than one gigantic one. It also helps in cutting your losses in the event of a mishap, as well as reducing the severity of something like a solvent fire or explosion.