The gerbil has been at it again!

He used iodine free salt to break an emulsion a few extractions ago. It worked so well that he added it to his personal tek. The last few times he just added it straight away at the beginning. He has not had an emulsion since.

He uses 60g per liter of distilled water.

Anyone else heard of this being done? He hadn't seen this step in any teks except as troubleshooting for emulsions but the salts cheap enough.

I'm not super experienced with STBs, but it seems like there shouldn't be too many issues with using salt from the get-go.

Here are my guesses as to why it's not included in any teks:

1) It ain't always necessary
2) The pre-existing solution was "add more saturated lye water" (thank god salt came about)
3) There's still unknowns about using salt. I.E. How does it affect the solubility of DMT in the aqueous solution? It could actually go either way, salt sometimes increases water's solubility, but it could also be taking up holes in the water where DMT could be.

I am inclined to agree. You can avoid emulsion with lye. The 1:1 bark to lye ratio prevents the emulsion. Adding sodium chloride seems pointless.
Mind you I only ever do small batches of 50-75g of bark at a time. But I have never had lye lock - ever with 1:1. I have had it where I did not add enough water, which causes similar problems, but thats why powdered bark suggests more h20

Well, if salt works as fine as lye to get rid of the emulsions, then intuitively salt is a better option. It is way safer and cheaper.

Salt does not have the capacity to change the pH of the solution. In addition, theory predicts that salt (just like sodium hydroxide) increase the ionic strength of a solution. This would make dmt even less likely to love the water and will push it to the non-polar layer. dmt is very slightly soluble in water and it already struggles with water being a polar solvent. Give it an even more polar solvent (salty water) and it wants to leave the place! But that's of course in theory.

Thanks for the input. The gerbil will probably leave it out on the next one just to see if the emulsions return.

i hd a diffucilt time getting an emulsion to form with my extractions. I ended up shaking to see what happened. sure enough there was an emulsion which then settle 5-10 minutes later. If your PH is high enough, emulsion shouldnt be a problem,

In my last STB, I used a 4:1 salt to lye water solution as my "emulsion breaking" spare water. Worked better then just lye IMO.

Which is why I shake OFTEN as it does not cause a problem and increases solvent to solution surface area.