I'm in the middle of an extraction and need some advice...

I followed Phlux tek and everything went fine, but when I collected the HCL water after pulling from Xylene, I noticed it smelled realy basic. Almost like the basic cactus soup.

A quick test revealed a Ph of 9.

It seems to me that this was way too high.

I checked the Nexus chat and was happy to hear that it's ok to put everything back in the containter and start over again.

Today I spent my evening carefully separating Xylene from basic soup, and then salting the Xylene with HCL water brought to Ph3.

Nevertheless after salting the same basic smell was noticed, and the Ph tested 9 again

I read that when the final pull comes out basic this is an indication of more goodies in the NP. Is this correct?

Should i just ignore the smell and continue pulling till Ph drops?

whatever the shit you did, you cant salt with a ph of 9...

salting with hcl should be done with a dillution ratio simmiliar to this: 5 ml of 10percent hcl added to 25ml distilled water, this is for a 300-500 ml nps salt, one of the three per pull
a ph of 3 is wayyy too low youll end up precipitating all sorts of gunk into your hcl, it dosent matter too much other than evapping is a bitch and you may need another anhydrous acetone wash to compensate for the sloppiness thus far.


if it burns yellow it has sodium in it, you dont want sodium in your end product. which should be slightly acidic if rehydrated fyi




peace

mmm..maybe I did not express myself correctly:

I did not salt with a solution of Ph 9...the Ph of the acid water raised from 3 to 9 after separating from the NP.

The salting water was established by adding one drop of 33% to 75 ml of water.

So is this raise in Ph normal? and what about the smell?

how well are you separating the layers? Is it possible your solvent is coming with traces of lye, before yu do the salting? How big in ml is your salting pull, and how big are the solvent pulls? What happened if you do a second salting on that pull, does the pH again go up?

I try to be very precise with the separation. I also put the salting water+ NP in a warm water bath before separating...

I have about 1300ml of basified tea to which I added about 200ml of Xylene. the xylene was pulled from the tea and about 75 ml of HCL water was added.

a second salting with fresh HCL water made the water go up from pH 3 to pH 9 again. Same smell...

I don't know if lye can migrate in the solvent for some reason?

I'm not sure what pH the salting pull should have after the first pull...is pH raise from 3 to 9 definately and indication of lye contamination in the solvent?

EDIT: i found a thread at mycotopia about this:
http://forums.mycotopia....c-hcl-extraction-ph.html

apparantly the freebase mescaline that's left in the NP makes the pH of the acid water raise during the pull...thus being an indication that there is still more to pull. That makes absolute sense to me...

The nitrogen on the mesc makes it basic... hence the name alkaloid. I dont know what ph a saturated solution of mesc is offhand but its probably somewhere around 9 or 10. What you have started to get into is called titration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titration. you can actually measure the amount of mescaline you have by measuring how much acid it takes to bring the ph of your salting water down to 7. If you add more acid than is needed, there is good reason to believe you will start to pull impurities that are dissolved in the NP layer into the salting water.

You can do a single salting pull and get all the actives if you are good with the ph strips. add acid gradually until ph 6-7 is reached while the water is in contact with the NP and separate layers.

thanks a lot ouro!!

so I probably just panicked and started all over two times...for nothing. I just hope that I don't loose too much yield by restarting twice and spilling some xylene during the process.
I think starting with half of the chips was a good decision