Thought I would share my experience with using the Sodium Carbonate Wash.

Having performed 3 extractions now, I have always found that my yields have been very low (0.2%). I have always used the Sodium Carbonate Wash technique because obvioulsy, I want to get an as clean product as possible.

Most recently, i extracted 1 gram of DMT from 500 g MHRB pieces (miserable I know). With the DMT being of its usual yellowish colour, and this time around, the spice leaving me always feeling slight nausea, I decided to 'recrystalise' in order to try and clean it up a bit. I done this by redissolving the 1g DMT into 35ml of Swan Lighter Fluid. However, I also decided that it might be a good idea to perform another Sodium Carbonate Wash....

.....The end result is that i have went from 1 gram of yellowish DMT to 0.2g of crystal clear DMT, the other 0.8g, I presume was pissed away down the sink along with the Sodium Carbonate solution.

I think Sodium Carbonate washing should be confined to the sin bin of DMT extraction techniques, alongside it's evil older brother, the Ammonia wash.

You got 1g from 500g? Are you doing multiple extractions? You should be getting somewhere closer to 5g from that amount if you've done a thorough number of extractions.

The key to making it work properly is to use a very tiny amount of sodium carbonate saturated water, compared to your amount of DMT saturated solvent. If you do it properly there is minimal to no loss at all. Since you used DMT saturated solvent, and probably more sodium carbonate water than you needed, the yield was lost. Another thing, and one of the most important things in any extraction, is to not throw anything away until the end, as everything could have been recovered if you didn't pour it down the sink.

For instance, when I have a half gallon of solvent from all pulls combined, I wash the solvent, with maybe 20-50 mls of sodium carbonate saturated water. There is no loss in yield, and I wash it 2 times with the sodium carb water and once with plain cold tap water..

Thanks for sharing the results of your experiment.

Now, first of all, nothing is loss until you throw it away. As it's said very often in the Nexus, do not throw ANYTHING away until you have your final yield!

Secondly, even if your DMT was lost to your sodium carb wash, which it shouldnt because of polarity, you could always recover it back by raising the pH of the wash water and pulling with solvent again.

Now, my questions I have to try to understand what you did and what your mistake could have been:

how much sodium carbonate per how much water for that amount of solvent, and what was the temperature of the water? I notice you used a very concentrated solution of DMT, and then did a wash. Washes should be done with a smaller amount of water than that of naphtha, and its usually done in naphtha pulls, not on small amount of re-x solvent. So lets say for a 150ml pull, a 25-50ml sodium carb solution would be used.

Then, another thing is that 35ml of naphtha does not hold a lot of spice, specially when cooled down. When that very concentrated amount of solvent touched the sodium carb water, the solvent could have cooled down and its possible some dmt started to precipitate. If DMT precipitated, it would stay between he naphtha and the water layer, but you might have thrown it away when separating both layers.

Also, when you say you "redissolved 1g in 35ml", was there any goo that did not dissolve in the solvent? Did you threw it away if there was? Maybe part of your weight was lost there, usually its recommended to do a second pull on the goo left behind with smaller amount of solvent, and just re-xing by itself will make you lose some weight (impurities that get left behind when warming/pulling and/or impurities that stay on the solvent when you freeze it out)

How did you crystallize that DMT? Did you freeze? If you froze, did you evap the rest of the solvent to see if there was anything left?

And, was there any loss of DMT to the container you crystallized it in? Did you use ethanol or acetone or even some warm naphtha to pick up un-scrapped traces of DMT spread around the container and re-evap it again together ?

Now I know I am just a noob here still, but were you actually extracting from pieces? As in the whole chipped rootbark that comes in large pieces around an inch across and just as wide? If this is the case then you might not have been able to even pull much end product from your mhrb solution. Mhrb is extremely hard and must be shredded or powdered to properly extract from.

good catch BCBUDD777

If chunks are left in basified solution for a few days to a week they can effectively be lysed to the point of solution. At least this is what I've gathered from past experimentation. You can see this by the way the fibers stick to the bottom. Once those are gone it's been effectively broken down. It's better to break it down before you extract, though.

I stated 'pieces' in order to highlight the fact that my MHRB never came in powdered form but yes, I did pulverise the pieces myself beforehand. however, in with all the powder was lots of fibrous material (cos I cant be arsed to seperate it all out).

@endlessness.

I will concede that you most definitely have a good point with regards to the Sodium Carbonate solution cooling down the warm DMT packed naphtha solution. In fact, it is more than just a good point, with hindsight I think that is exactly what happened. I checked my turkey baster earlier today and there was even DMT crystals forming around the nib of that, just as there was crystals forming in amongst all the other scum left over in the jar i used.

As for never throwing stuff away, when I wash with sodium carbonate, I squirt the polar solution immediately down the drain.

Although in this case I have made an obvious schoolboy error. Even when sticking more closely to the textbook, I often find that with a Sodium Carbonate wash, an emulsion is formed which allies itself more with the polar than the non-polar divide int he solution, and thus, this gets squirted away along with the sodium carb solution. It was a similar polar friendly emulsion that was left sticking to the jar in which I done my Re-X carbonate wash (and also inside my turkey baster), from which the rogue DMT crystals formed.

@Global
As for my yields, I more or less follow the Lex-Tek and this Tek, it is stated that his yields are between 0.5% and 0.65%. Even in this light my yields are poor, but knowhere near as poor as they would be if the typical extraction yield was 1%. I think that since MHRB typically contains 1% of its total volume in DMT, in order to get a 100% extraction, you would need a pretty nifty set-up and beyond a 'kitchen chemists' understanding of the process.

I keep doing A/B extractions on the bark until I get no more yield. However, since I acid cook the bark mixture for around 2-3 hours, I find that 96% of my yield comes from the first pull.

Next time, I am going to dispense with the sodium carbonate wash and just clean using H2O, which will be enough to take out any lye contamination.....then I will clean the crystals by simply doing a Re-X and leaving the fatty by-product in the jar the best I can.

A yield of 1% or more is really not such an exotic result, and should be achievable by your average kitchen clod, assuming they follow a decent tek. If there's such a large differential, I would really switch teks and try to follow the new one to the letter. People are even getting 2% or more with the BLAB tek these days.

As for the sodium carbonate wash, I'll parrot what my compatriots here are saying, which is that it shouldn't rob your yield if you're doing it correctly. The water should be very cold, mixed in correct ratio to your solvent, and the idea is to get it in and out quickly. It separates within 10 seconds or so. At that point, get it out of there. If you can squirt it down the sink, you can squirt it into a mason jar. Hold onto everything until you're finished, then you won't have mystery losses. Wash all your pulls together at once, not individually. And if it's still not working for you, skip it altogether. You can always clean your product very effectively by recrystallizing with heptane.

I would check out Q21Q21's dry lime tek. It's simple and easy to do with safe products in quick time with large yields. I'd give it a look.

One question
Why does it need to be done quickly?