Hi, I am in the process of my second extraction. The first extraction I used cyb's first tek with MHRB. Now I am giving his upgraded MAX ION tek a go. As the title states, I am experiencing some confusion during the pre-evaporation step. What I am seeing is that over the period of time from pulls 1-6 while the pulls are successively accumulating in the jar in the fridge that there appears to be crystals crashing out into the bottom of the jar. Now I am to the part where it directs to pre-evaporate ~40% of the naphtha. I am wondering why there is a transfer from the jar to a dish and why in the tek it doesn't just go straight to the dish. I am confused as to how to best recover what will inevitably be left behind in the jar after I transfer into the dish as directed in the tek. Am I not understanding something here? Any advise appreciated.

Some improvements I made since my first extraction were getting a pH meter, a more accurate scale, and a thermometer and also using a crock pot which maintains a lower heat more easily than the double boiler style method. I believe I had it way too hot during my first extraction due to misunderstanding what the hot water bath temp should have been. Overall I have been quite satisfied with the process, minimal frustration.

Thank you

Could I get some input as to how long I should expect the pre-evaporation step to take to reduce the volume by ~40%? After giving it ~30 minutes and noticing no change to the volume other than it increasing by the amount of a dog hair I decided to skip this step and to separate the total 6 pulls into 4 dishes ala the original tek. Really tried to follow the tek exactly and everything had gone very smooth up until this step and it was just quite frustrating.

From what I am observing it really seems like the jar is just unnecessary, pre-evaporating in a dish would allow more exposure to the air than even a large wide mouth jar, imagining the flow of air over the mouth of a jar where the naphtha is several inches below the top vs over a dish where the naphtha is <1" from the top of the dish would seemingly be a major benefit.

I ended up adding a small amount of naphtha to the jar and putting it into the heat bath which successfully pulled the residue that had formed on the bottom.

Thank you.

You can go straight to freeze if you like.
The purpose of cooling in the fridge first is to grow nice large xtals by slowly cooling from warm to freeze (so you will see some crashing while it's cooling).
Pre evap is for saturation of a 'smaller' amount of solvent to freeze with. Use a dish if you like... (if you put a large volume of solvent in to freeze...it appears to be problematic dropping all of the saturate)

Right on, thanks for the reply and a big thanks for the work you put in making the tek.

Approximately how long does the pre-evaporation step take for you generally? any tips on how you set up the 'cold fan'? and by cold fan you do mean just any fan ...or is a cool fan a fan with some type of additional air conditioning-esque cooling method of additionally cooling the air?

Cold fan is a just a fan. Time depends of the volume, surface exposed and conditions but it's quite fast (15-20 min here, warm climate, wide jar) with a fan.