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Dude don’t hog the cookie. Munch munch pass.
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Y’know, there are some people here talking about how people who do this wrong are somehow just stupid and that there is a right way and wrong way to do this.
My experience with pressure vessels and flammables is that if you’re a DIYer and you’re sure you’re doing it right, you might not be doing it right. Maybe leave it to someone who spent a little money on the right tools for the job.
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My problem was I was being offered at parties. So very noisy, you’re paranoid about the cops, and it turns out I don’t handle it well after I’ve drank alcohol.
I had some in Amsterdam - legally in a chill smoke room at the hostel, very different experience.
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A house was blown up in my neighborhood by a college kid cooking with Butane. He was in the basement, butane is heavier than air. He was smart enough to turn off the pilot lights for furnace and water heater, but misjudged whether the air was clear and blew the house off it’s foundations when relighting them. He survived with bad burns. The house came down misaligned to the foundation, which was cracked by the explosion. They had to tear the whole thing out.
If he’d been doing this at ground level he probably would have taken out several neighboring houses with the explosion. Thankfully the basement foundation forced the explosion upwards.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWxd971Z8cs
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- Meant to say “extracting with Butane”. He was making oils.
As it turned out in Colorado, enough people blew up / burned / scared themselves or the authorities enough that it’s illegal to use flammable solvents for making cannabis concentrates at home.
However, the state nicely directs people to alternatives that won’t blow up your house / garage / dorm room. Unfortunately, the information is rather sparse.
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The cat lived!!! But was definitely not a happy cat.
Legalization is the gateway to the first step onto that slippery slope. The only solution is to criminalize all non-work activity.
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I’m impulsive and can have an addictive personality, both things i’ve been aware of myself so i’ve always tried to be mindful of taking things under my own terms. I didn’t drink until i was 20 and i didn’t smoke pot until i was in my late 20’s. Not judging other people, i know what i’m like 
The concern is that they legalized flower, but concentrates are delayed 1yr. so they predict that people who have been using and buying concentrates, will make their own concentrates from legal flower they buy for the next year until it becomes legal to buy again.
of course a rosin press is much safer and cheaper and better suited for home extraction without any chemicals or solvents. it can even be done with parchment paper and a hair straightener with high yields. why anyone would do home bho unless they grew is beyond me.
Not CO2, that is the prefered method for the industry currently, but the equipment required and expertise isn’t accessible to most and is super expensive. ISO Alcohol, Butane, Naptha, Propane, Hexane, and a number of other solvents can be used for extraction in small batches fairly cheaply but are more dangerous because of their volatility and flammability, when handled by amatures.
I primarily use this method. no smoke or tar for the lungs, ability to very precise regulate dosage, immediate pain relief, much less lingering smell. people often focus on the fact that you can consumer much greater quantities this way and forget that it is also a much safer cleaner way to consume as well. people paint it as scary with that one guys crazy story and it freaks people out when the reality is a small dab vape pen can be used in a lot more places a lot more safely and discreetly than smoking a jay.
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Hashr
I think.
You can buy kits here in Canadia now. I can only hope they take some of the danger out of the doing it at home.
As for edibles. We’re considering renting our Magic-Butter maker out. (We (use to) use it for infusing EVOO with Rosemary and the like, but it’s designed for pot) We imagine there might be a market. You bring us your herb, we’ll make it into an oil or a tincture and you pay us a nominal fee. Legal? I dunno, but I don’t see why not.
Let’s straighten a few things out:
- Butane hash oil (BHO) is widely regarded as the most flavorful cannabis extraction. Like any concentrate, it has to be dosed properly; you can easily get fucked up if you take a big “dab” (the term for vaporizing a concentrate using a heated surface of some kind) but a small dab can be extremely effective for ADHD, pain and a lot of other conditions. I know tons of people who dab all the time and are highly functional and creative. As always, YMMV.
The effects of concentrates are different than for smoked flowers, different from vaped flowers, and different from edibles. Each one has it’s place and it’s advocates. I once had a severe muscle spasm that wouldn’t respond to smoked cannabis flowers. A large dab went straight to the pain and released the spasm. Literally seconds after I took the dab I was able to move my neck without crippling spasms. A close friend had a nearly identical experience. Went to the emergency room with spasms, then came home and took a huge dab, which promptly unlocked the muscle. MAD RESPECT for concentrates. Haters are mostly ignorant.
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CO2 is another method of extraction. It’s MUCH more expensive and doesn’t capture the same flavor profile as butane extraction. But the legal situation around butane extraction makes it risky, if not totally illegal in many states. That’s the biggest reason a lot of concentrates manufacturers in California switched to CO2. I also happen to know of several companies who do butane extraction and call it C02, to cover their asses legally.
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Butane extraction can be done safely in a closed-loop system, in which no butane is released to the outside environment (it’s recaptured in a solvent tank). Companies like Bhogart sell professional-grade, ISO-certified stainless steel extractors that are widely used throughout the industry. But it does require expertise and should not be done by amateurs.
Several companies are working on budget-priced home systems that use a closed-loop process and are quite safe. The big issue will be getting them legally certified.
- Open blasting, which is what this scare story is about, is where an amateur essentially sprays open cans of butane through a tube of cannabis, at which point a lot of it spills out to the ground and stays there. This is dangerous and stupid if it’s done in an enclosed space. If you are outside in a well-ventilated area there is essentially zero risk but if you are in a house any random spark can blow up the house. Hence the sensationalistic stories of stoners destroying their apartments, which are true…but also only happen when morons open blast indoors. They make good copy, but don’t confuse incompetent morons with the rapidly-maturing concentrates industry, which Canada has apparently forced to remain underground.
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I think, in this case, the problem is that the easiest option is a not terribly safe one. Butane is handy because it’s trivially available; not hideously hepatotoxic or the like, doesn’t do too much violence to the chemicals you are interested extracting; and can be swiftly and conveniently evaporated without vacuum apparatus or temperatures that will either degrade or evaporate what you are trying to concentrate.
The explosion risk is a downer; but it’s one of those things-that-might-happen-in-the-future problems that are much easier to ignore than the equipment-you-need-in-order-to-start problems that you run into with something nicer, like a supercritical CO2 extraction: those are less explosive; and likely gentler on the product; but the hardware you need to do it is substantially more involved.
A problem that would likely solve itself if it weren’t for the fact that non-DIY concentrates are currently illegal; unless you are more in it for the tinkering with pressure vessels than for the hash oil the case is really, really, weak for doing it yourself rather than just having a professional with economies of scale do it; but since that’s currently not allowed we get the poorly equipped amateurs.
If doing these sorts of extractions were just plain difficult and unsafe as a rule the perfume industry would be a nonstop series of explosions and decaf coffee would taste of the blood of the workers who were sacrificed to produce it. They aren’t; if it isn’t amateur hour.
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Emphasis added. Any time I made BHO, it was outside until all that was left was a super-sticky yellow-green residue; then it was inside for scraping. And scraping. And f$#%king scraping. Same with Isopropyl Alcohol. And I’m cautious with Everclear, too, even if that’s too cautious.
Gave up making these things when I discovered the large number of mail-order places selling better product with way less hassle. Or scraping.
Which makes me wonder how long I’ll bother growing my 4 plants. Once all the hiccups are eliminated with the legal system, it’s gonna be hard to justify all that work. Mainly spending most of Oct. in the garage cutting & trimming.
If it should ever become legal where i live i reckon i’ll grow some plants for the novelty of it, i do that with regular food producing plants already. I have 3 pepper plants, a banana and avocado plants plus i have planned to grow some other stuff from seed. I’d be jazzed to grow pot even if nothing great came of it
If you make BHO you need a vacuum oven of some sort anyway. Or wait a weeks for it to finish.
I just did my first crop. Came out great. Finished trimming on the same day recreational places opened in this state ($420 /oz omfg) and had a nice little pile of kief as a reward. I did a 3x3 tent with 9 autoflower plants under a HPS. I kept it as simple as possible with good soil, a traditional light and it worked out great. The autoflowers started after 4 weeks, so there was not much trimming to do. I only really got a chance to top them once before they started flowering. It did not seem like a lot of work, but I did have to dedicate a couple of weekend days to it. Maybe it will seem like more work on my third crop, but I’ve been sick of paying for cannabis for a long time.
I misspoke. I meant just letting the butane boil off by itself after going through the weed-filled tube (yikes! we didn’t use glass, just black plumbing pipe (ABS, PVC?), which I guess is bad…) and then warming the collected goo to boil of more butane, then scrape with a razor blade and store in wax paper-line jars. BHO sounds much more involved.
ETA: congrats on your growing success! What I’d like is a machine that can take in raw cannabis plant at one end and output various product. Dial settings for: Flower, Kief, Hash, Rosen, Hash Oil, etc. (I don’t like single-taskers!)
Unfortunately the really safe and efficient method, supercritical CO2 extraction, is also expensive.
