Hi hi,

I'm new to this forum and also to the world of spice and had a quick question. Say someone's freezer is for some reason not working like it should suddenly. Still cold but just not... well barely freezing I'd say. How important is it for the temperature to be sub-zero for freeze precipitation? Doing an STB extraction if that makes a difference and the MHRB is waiting in the NaOH for me to figure this out..

Also sorry if I posted this in the wrong area, if I did and someone's able to move it I'd appreciate you

I love all the information that's available here and how supportive most of you are though, good vibes all around!

Hi Gary,

I see you mentioned in your post that you are waiting for an answer while your MHRB is sitting in your lye solution, and yet no one else has replied. Here are my two cents for you in case you wanted to get on with it already:
It is to my understanding that freezer temperature should not matter. Even if it is slightly above room temperature, it would still produce crystals except via something more on the lines of an evaporation/freeze combo I would think. If it can freeze ice cream, you should be good to go for the freeze precipitation approach vs more of an evaporation approach.

Peaceful regards,
DMT Hotpockets

i have no idea about the actual chemestry, but i think this depends on the kind of naphta you are using. when the temp is lower the naphta can no longer hold as much spice and you want that to happen so it drops out of solution.

as DMT Hotpockets wrote anything that keeps ice cream frozen should be fine.
you certainly would be able to just evaporate all the napha, but i would not recommend it. especially since you can reuse your naphta multiple times

Don't know your situation, but you might try unplugging the fridge/freezer and take a look at the fan on the bottom or sometimes in the back of it, you'd be surprised how much difference just cleaning one will make. A friend of ours who is in that business told us that people typically burn up otherwise perfectly good refrigerators by simply not cleaning the fans and coils.

The temperature is indeed important - as the lower the less DMT your Naphtha will hold. So if you are freeze precipitating and your temperature is 10 °C higher than the one of your neighbour, then he will get more precipitation than you - and you will be left with more Spice inside your Naphtha that does nto crash out.

You can work against this by evaporating more.

I did a measurement and if I recall correctly it is like this:

at - 20 °C 100 ml of Naphtha still contains ~ 150 mg Spice



so if your Freezer only has - 5 °C then you may still have ~ 300 mg of spice - but I dont know ... at least it will be more than 150 mg.

So either evaporate more or you could do another thing which is nice to consider:

Freeze precipitate as normal and then you MAY be left with Naphtha that still contains a worthy amount of DMT not precipitated.

Then just set this Naphtha aside and dont throw it away and use it the next time. When you freeze precipitate AGAIN with this naphtha, then you will get all your goodies, because the DMT of the last time is still inside of it then thus even at - 5 °C you will get the complete amount. Only the 1. extraction with this Naphtha will not yield the total amount that you got.

Sorry if this does not sound really well ... english = not native language

Thanks for all the help! The fan, it seems, was the culprit because now it's running like new! Got two pulls of snow white spice (0.2g), one pull of yellow spice (0.7g) and now I'm just getting what looks like crystals which then end up just being sticky brown goop. Safe to say that another longer pull wouldn't be worth it?

0.9 isn't too bad though for a first go at it. Will have to see if there are any teks that maximize yield for the next go around. Thanks again for all the help!