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Sodium bicarb. wash?

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TheAppleCore

TheAppleCore

Rising Star
I'm wondering if you can do a polar wash of DMT with sodium bicarbonate instead of sodium carbonate, like all teks seem to require?

The only explanation I've seen for sodium carb. being chosen over sodium bicarb. was that the pH of a sodium bicarb. solution would be too low, and hence a significant amount of your freebase would be salted and washed away.

For two reasons, this doesn't make any sense to me:

1) Most teks indicate that two plain distilled water washes should follow a sodium carb. wash -- if it's true that sodium carb. is used to achieve a high pH so that the DMT isn't salted out, then using DH2O at a pH of 7 would totally defeat the purpose.

2) Couldn't you just use more sodium bicarb. in order to raise pH sufficiently?
 
Why dont you use carbonate? Its tried and tested, and it can be easily made by putting bicarb in a pot on the stove for some minutes or on the oven for an hour or so, till it loses about a third of its weight.

As for 1) , I agree that in a way it defeats the purpose to do plain distilled water washes after sodium carb, and I think some people might have small yield loss there. But also from experience I know that after you do one wash, when youre doing the second wash, there will be some remains of the first wash so there will still be a bit of sodium carb that will then mix with your plain water and raise a bit it's pH. A second plain water wash would be more dangerous ...

Notice that DMT freebase isnt really soluble in water, but one thing is to try to dissolve dmt crystals in water, another thing is when DMT is dissolved, it will be more exposed to the water, and potentially more easily dissolved under certain conditions (if the water is warm, if pH isnt purpousely made higher, etc). So better if water of wash is colder, and if pH is raised. If pH is raised with sodium bicarb, probably better than just plain water, but if its sodium carb is better than both

as for 2), there's a limit to how high sodium bicarb can take, even if you saturate the water with it (IIRC, somewhere around ph 9 ?), so no..

Lastly, you would do a good favor to the comunity if you would just experiment with side by side and let us know.. So for example do half your batch with pure water wash, half with sodium carb.. or half bicarb half carb.. or whatever else you want to compare, and tell us :)

Hope that helped.
 
Thanks for the information, endlessness. =) In Entropymancer's DMT Extraction Overview, he alludes to the sodium carbonate wash requiring a pH of roughly 8.5. If your memory is correct, and sodium bicarbonate can achieve a pH of 9, it still might be suitable.

Sorry, can't do any experimentation, already went ahead and washed the entire batch with sodium carbonate.

I didn't end up doing a distilled water wash, though. If a small amount of sodium carb. ends up in my final product, it can't be any greater than the quantity of lye that ends up in an unwashed yield, which isn't enough to produce any obvious toxic effects. And sodium carbonate is significantly less nasty than lye, when it comes to toxicity. So I'm not too worried.
 
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