With a dumb idiot face on a dumb idiot head.

So I was gently heating a spirit bottle with basified mix and solvent on a hotplate stirrer. Except it wasn't gentle. It's an analog hotplate, so I highly underestimated its heating capabilities. The biggest mistake was using a cork stopper on the bottle. I just absent mindedly put it on.


Lo and behold, the results of this extraction.

Count yourself lucky that the bottle didn't crack from the heat, especially while pressurized.

Always use a hot water bath if you want to heat extraction vessels. The water will act as a heat buffer, reducing thermal shock to the glass. If, despite all care taken, the glass does break, the water bath will function as a backup container for the spill.

Even with a hot water bath you should try to avoid strong heating. Also, don't put the glass directly onto the bottom of the bath, but put it on a raiser that allows water to flow in between the glass and the bath bottom.

Count yourself lucky we're not reading about you in local newspapers.

Caution and safety. Never enough of those.

Mɒydɘ you ƨʜoulb ɿɘƚʜinʞ youɿ qlɒnƨ ƚo movɘ ƚo ɒ ɔɒvɘ.

Its probably good that you had a cork stopper in, instead of something that wouldn't blow off.

The most important thing is that you are alive and well.

"When life gives you mimosa soup, don't explosively paint the ceiling and walls with it."


Now that the mood is lightened, we can never be too careful. As always, live, learn and carry on safely!

Update: Bleach got rid of all of the wall stains. Ceiling needs to be repainted.

funny

Glad it didn't turn out that bad for you bodhisativa, really could've been a lot worse. I'm sure the lesson was learned though, not that that's the way you wanted to learn it, but I'm still glad it just mounted to a minor incident and that's all.

Be safe friend


Peace

ive seen worse.........


you will also, unless you get serious about lab safety.

My lab is completely safe. I made it idiot proof. Except I'm the idiot in charge. I had to take a dump, so I quickly corked the bottle, shook it, and forgot to take the cork out.

Glad to see/read that you are foing fine.

As mentioned by pitubo: To still improve the idiot-proofness of your lab and process, I also recommend to switch to water-heat-bathes instead of heating any solvent on a direct heating source. Even in the water-heat-bath the (glas) bottle can break but it still avoids the appearance of unwanted dfo's (defined flying objects - glas and solvent).

Soup on, tseuq

Mmmm, already handled it. Bought a large flat bottom bowl as a water bath. I use a rice cooker to heat my solvent. The reason I put the base/solvent mix on direct heat was because I forgot to heat my solvent before adding to the base. In hindsight, I don't need to heat it at all, just need to give it more time for the DMT to migrate into the solvent. This quote sums up this thread.



I have 7 years of lab experience, working in PC2 facilities as well as chemistry labs. Even experienced people can make mistakes. "A smart person learns from their own mistakes, a smarter person learns from the mistakes of others".

We're all happy you recovered from the little mishap. And my sincere compliments to you for publicly discussing mistakes made. Errors can be the most effective lessons. By discussing the errors openly, we can all learn and improve our insights and practices, without having to individually make all the mistakes. Or suffer the consequences, because sometimes error-based learning is not free for the first-hand participants..


Perhaps it is better to not heat the solvent anyway, but instead heat (or better: warm) the combination of basic soup and solvent. The soup has a much higher thermal mass and also more volume than the solvent, so a cool soup would quickly cool down a hot solvent anyway. Besides, for good extractability, the soup and solvent needs to be not much warmer than hand warm, so a tub filled with warm water to rest the flask in, in between shaking and while waiting for layers to separate, is ideal.


Exactly. Many people read the nexus and this thread. Most do not arrive here with this much experience and knowledge.

Oh man. Glad to hear that you're okay!

What I do is I pour the solvent into a glass bottle, and heat it in a hot water bath. I then pipette the hot solvent into the basic soup container, which I put in a warm water bath. My thinking was that adding a little bit of thermal energy might aid the extraction process a little bit. Does DMT instantly migrate to the solvent, or does it take time?

Well, the dmt can only migrate where there is a boundary between layers. So it will take a little time for most of the dmt molecules to get a turn to "sit at the window" and jump out into the non-polar layer.

Shaking helps to move the molecules around a little more than they were already doing by convection and brownian motion. It also helps by creating a temporary suspension of both layers, which greatly increases the surface of the boundary between the layers.

of course, at no point is RBF , half full, and vacume with boiling chips,
and heating mantles with temp control, or kitty litter or lexan blast shields even considered.

isnt there a book called " lab survival manual?"

if ya cant put out a liters sized solvent fire instantly, your lab is unsafe IMO.

glad your safe.
you dont always get a second chance though............

OT, but I'm really curious about what's written on your whiteboard. It looks like some kind of algebraic geometry or topology?

Blessings
~ND

Here you go. It's an explanation of reductionist thinking. I wrote it on my whiteboard to remind me to NOT think that way.

You're as bad as me with the tabs!

I suggest finding yourself a good tab manager. I use Tab Mix Plus (Firefox). They help tons with that problem.