Washing limonene with water before salting?

[w0mbat]

Does anyone wash their limonene/xylene/etc. layer with water before salting? SWIM thinks this might improve purity by removing water-soluble gunk from the limonene layer that would otherwise wind up in his evap dish, but he has held off doing because he worries about the water carrying off some of the goodies in addition to the gunk. However, he wonders if just a small amount of water might improve purity notably while only decreasing yield a tiny bit. Is this a good idea? Has anyone done this with noticeable results?

 

[soulfood]

This is pretty much what people use the sodium carbonate wash for. It's essentially just rinsing the solvent layer, but you need to add the sodium carbonate to maintain the pH of the goods in the solvent so that they don't migrate to the water layer.

 

[Infundibulum]

Exactly, add at least some base to maintain the mescaline in freebase form. But even then some will be lost since freebase mescaline is somewhat soluble in water.

 

[endlessness]

As they said, freebase mescaline is reasonably water soluble even at high pH, which means every acqueous wash in your solvent will probably make you lose some considerable yield.

I would strongly recommend against this. If you are salting out with HCl, I think its much more effective to make a wash on your mescaline with (dry) acetone/IPA, after the water is evaporated.

 

[w0mbat]

Thx for the quick replies. I'll let my friend know asap

Edit:

I would strongly recommend against this. If you are salting out with HCl, I think its much more effective to make a wash on your mescaline with (dry) acetone/IPA, after the water is evaporated.

Would this apply for either an acetone OR an IPA wash, or only if you're going to wash with acetone AND IPA? SWIM has been able to use only food-grade reagents so far and would rather not have to use technical grade acetone at this point