I saved the naphtha I poured off of frozen MHRB dishes. It is yellow, I assume from fats. Heard it could be re-used, easily.

Do I just mix it with water, shake, let separate and siphon off??

There must be information on this somewhere. Have done google searches and come up with nothing. Found this in the FAQ but does not point to any information on water, acid, or carbonate washes, and no info on how to use carbon or diamataceous earth.

This is what I found, but no details -

Another useful and fairly simple method, besides distillation, for cleaning up a solvent that has been 'dirtied' with various undesired substances. Is to use a bit of activated charcoal. It adsorbs anything you were unable to get out with water washes, carbonate washes, acidic washes.

Ive gotten practically all of the colour out of solvents with this method, though, mine were not dark dark, opaque yellow coloured.

It can be a bit difficult to filter, but with the addition of one of the most useful substances on earth, DIATOMACEOUS earth, it clumps the carbon enough to make filtering a simple task

Using yellow naphtha is just fine. It will turn otherwise white spice yellow. That's it. Nothing wrong with yellow.

Thanks, I plan on re-extracting when done doing all pulls, with heptane anyway.

I thought it would prevent the Naphtha from holding as much as it can.

I know I have seen a detailed method of cleaning Naphtha on this site but can not find it. Anyone know the best method.

Best I can find is Seachem carbon pellets, with sodium carbonate solution. If that does it well, will try it.

Does cleaning it remove any DMT at the same time, or does the DMT stay in the Naphtha?

I have tons of carbon pellets from air cleaners, so would use that. If I have to buy some special carbon, might as well just throw out Naphtha and buy more.

TIA

If you wash your recovered naphtha with a bit of vinegar water first, that will clear up any remaining alkaloids before you add the charcoal. The wash vinegar can then be added to a subsequent extraction, before the base is added.

If your carbon pellets have been used before, their activity will be lower. Depending on the odours they have absorbed from air, they could potentially contaminate the naphtha, so the option of simply using more would have to be considered with a suitable degree of caution. They can be reactivated although I get the impression that that would be too much trouble for you. Considering MHRB doesn't contain any significant quantity of fats, a simple acid wash followed by a sodium carbonate wash will suffice even if you don't have reliable activated carbon.

Actual fats (triglycerides) are generally better solvents for DMT than naphtha is anyhow.

Another option for naphtha purification is distillation. This requires an appropriate level of technical knowledge and can be lethally dangerous for you and other people if executed incorrectly. The technical level of your question suggests that you would have to increase your skill level before attempting this.

Can`t say about naphtha, but in the past I reused same hexan many times for pulling. It just became more yellowish and smelly.


I tried this method. Maybe was not enough of charcoal, but I didn`t notice any big difference before and after 'cleaning'.

Thanks. Will try that. Have plenty of unused carbon stored in ziplocs.

Advanced Practical Organic Chemistry, pg 79

Related info: On reusing non polar solvents
You probably found this link in the faq but I thought it was cool to highlight it here.

dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=48980

Cyb's 4th point in the second comment. Sodium carb wash.

Took me a long time to find that when I had the same question, good thing I saved the link.

I wonder if Naphtha used for extraction will contain traces of acetic acid if vinegar was used to lyse the bark. Acetic acid, despite being polar, happens to be miscible with aliphatic hydrocarbons shorter than Octane, which Naphtha is made of. Will excess NaOH push any non-dissociated acetic acid into the NPS layer?

The answer is negative. I added 50% heptane to 50% of vinegar, and then dropped a large amount of lye in. I decanted the heptane layer after mixing.

The heptane remained fully neutral as far as pH papers can see. At the same time, I saw how easy it was to contaminate the non-polar solvent with the basic water.

On the attached picture on the left you can see a pH paper that touched the very bottom of the glass with the decanted heptane - the brown'ish color represents pH > 13. I then repeated the same experiment with much greater care (allowing the two layers to settle for a few minutes, removing heptane very carefully with a syringe, staying away from the separation line, etc.) and the second time the pH remained neutral, top to bottom, as you see on the right.

So nope, excess NaOH does not seem to push acetates into the non-polar solvent. The risk of contaminating the solvent with lye is rather high, but it is straightforward to detect it by swiping the very bottom of the container that holds the decanted heptane with a pH paper.

What should the of unaffected heptane be? 7?

Yes, 7.0 (if one generalizes the definition of pH to mean the activity of protons).

Note that you cannot use the typical household pH meter to measure a non-polar solvent's pH reliably. It works by generating electric current between the anode and catode, but pure non-polar hydrocarbon solvents will not ionize.