question regarding cleaning spice

[moracca]

Ok, so imagine this scenario: someone has ~1.5g of spice, and wishes to clean using sodium bicarbonate. the spice is dissolved in ~30mL of naptha by way of heating, and 3g sodium bicarbonate is dissolved in 100 mL H2O. The two are then mixed, and decanted, and the naptha is put into freezer to precipitate. Only problem is, nothing is precipitating. Any ideas of how this could happen? could the h2o/Na bicarb mixture have cooled the naptha, forcing some of the spice to precipitate out, which then dissolved into the h2o/Na bicarb? If so, how would one get it out of that mixture??

 

[moracca]

so I left it overnight, and of the original 1.5g, MAYBE 0.1g has precipitated out. so where the heck did it all go?? the .1 that did precipitate out wasn't even from the original naptha pull, I mixed more naptha with my leftover sodium bicarb/water mix, and pulled that off again. At a loss as to where the rest of my product went, since it really didn't seem that dirty to begin with, it was basically white, I just didnt feel comfortable using it without cleaning it first

 

[Entropymancer]

Try evaporating the naphtha to make sure there's no spice in there. If there's still a lot missing, raise the pH of your bicarbonate solution (what pH is it at now?) and pull again with naphtha.