Ok, I have seen several teks recommending warming the naphta or other non polar solvent prior to doing a pull. I am not a chemist but I was a college chemistry major. This doesn't make sense to me. Water has much greater heat capacity than naphtha or hexane, and the volume ratio is something on the order of 20 or 30 to 1 at least. So help me out here, it seems to me that warm naphtha poured into an aqueous phase is going to reach thermal equillibrium after just one good swish. What's the point of that? Why not warm the aqueous phase and then do the pulls? Is there a drawback to that approach?

Darell

If you're doing STB method adding the Lye causes the water to heat up anyways, even in super dilute amounts it seems to heat up enough to be felt through the glass. I've seen teks that do advice to heat the water before adding bark as well though. Everyone does it different. Experiment find what works best for you.

The partition coefficient of naptha(XlogP) allows the lipophillicity of any plant matter that is un-ionizable to reach thermodynamic equillibrium when heated in water. While achieving a ph value in that of the solution to basify, any immiscible solvent will pull the dynamic concentraion of SWIY's available portion of xtals. Why it is heated is because of the fact that you must reach equillibrium to achieve maximum efficiency in your pulls. DMT has a XlogP of its own interestingly enough..

i have done extractions were my dmt saturated basic solution is in a crockpot with non polar solvent on top of it, mix thouroughly, then heat contents of crockpot for 30 mins or so and pull. worked fine for me, but isnt always that easy. but from my understanding its the non polar solvent being warm that allows for more saturation so its pointless to heat everything but it doesnt hurt