FAQ 

Can you sell extractors to Medical Facilities that deal with MJ Concentrates?

If the customer or potential customer indicates that the use of the extractor is going to be for the purpose of extracting a chemical that is controlled federally we will not sell a unit to them for that purpose. If that customer has already purchased an extractor and after the fact indicates the extractor will be used for this purpose we will be forced to void their warranty and cancel all support. The reason is there is no way to service a unit that has been tainted with a controlled substance. And to engage in guidance on the phone or via email may be interpreted as participation.

The fact that this unit can be used to extract any oil or chemical from any surface or porous material implies that you could use it for anything and are not limited to usage for one purpose. To limit yourself to one purpose that could eliminate any chance of obtaining an extractor is to close a door to any other opportunity the extractor could provide for you.

We are a legitimate researchers at Tamisium and long before this MJ movement came to our attention we were well on the way to creating this product for many other purposes. You can use Tamisium Extractors to extract estrogen from wheat, oil from algae or any other plant or seed, even oil from soil and any other chemical created by a plant or material. We will not set and watch one industry destroy it for everyone.
 

Are there Mercaptans/Odorants present in N-Butane

In the USA, detection of gas leaks by adding an odorant is typically required. When they are required the amount used should be detectable when the mixture of air and gas reaches 1/5 the lower combustible limit of the gas. Typically 1%. However you will find that most of the time, butane has no odorants added. You would be able to detect the odorants by the odor obviously and also by the spec sheet supplied by the supplier. There are lab grades of butane available with N-Butane supplied in a 99.9% purity and absolutely no odorants added at all. Fear of mercaptan ingestion is not of concern when pure butane is available.

As a matter of personal observation, I have never seen any butane with any Mercaptans added. This includes disposable canisters and commercial size tanks. I think this is because butane is NOT the best choice of fuel due to it's low condensing temperature.
 

How efficient is butane as a solvent?

After we built our first original prototype, before placing any plant material inside the unit, we performed an extraction to clean it out .. Using 99.5% pure butane during the extraction process, we extracted over 20 grams of oil from the pores of the the stainless steel extractor alone in a 5 gallon column. You can expect as high as 99% of the oil to be extracted from a plant or seed or any other material for that matter.

Due to the ability to adjust the major extraction parameters Q.D.T.P.T.P. or Quality of Material, Density of the material, Time soaked in Solvent, Pressure, Temperature and Polarity of the solvent/s. You can extract out a more pure product than before or extract full spectrum or anywhere in between. If you give the parameters values of only 10 each, meaning 10 different pressures, 10 different soak times etc., you have the ability to create 999,999 varieties of products.

Can the Recovery time of Butane be Decreased?

There are many techniques to rapidly recover (Evaporate and Condense) solvents including butane. However it is important to understand that increasing the rate of evaporation can greatly reduce the quality of your finished product. Using butane allows you to extract and capture very volatile oils that would be lost if any other solvent were used. This is because butane boils or evaporates at a lower temperature than anything you would be extracting out. Using solvent with higher boiling points that more closely match your extracted components would require you to boil those extracted components away when you boil your solvents away after using them to extract with. To raise this temperature or boil faster than you need to, would defeat the purpose of using butane. It does not matter if you use heat or vacuum to boil a solvent. Boiling or creating a pressure differential greater than required to boil butane, could cause extracted components to boil away as well.  In addition, as the extracted components become more viscous bubbles will start to form and may become large enough to enter into your upper valves. If this happens you could be required to disassemble your fittings for cleaning.

Soxhlet Extractions

When using a sohxlet extractor you use a lot of heat. Enough heat to boil the solvent at atmospheric pressure. This heat creates a wide band of extraction efficiency on a polarity scale. Meaning it even dissolves and extracts things that are not closely matching the polarity of the solvent. The heat is bad and the ability to target a specific target is gone. Great Heat creates more efficiency but with a price. With a Tamisium Extractor, you can use heat or you can elect not to. It is kind of like having a car that can go forward and in reverse.
Every extraction method has some limitation, you have to use pressure, you have to use heat, and so on. Now you can decide what you need and adjust accordingly
 

Is a Tamisium Extractor dangerous?

Any flammable solvent extractor is potentially dangerous and most solvents are flammable. No matter if it is boiling acetone and alcohol used in a soxhlet extractor with a heat source or butane in a cold Tamisium Extractor or a typical fuel pump extracting gas at any gas station, there are rules that we must follow. Laboratory safety precautions are the same with this extractor as with most others. The key point to note is that the Tamisium Extractors are totally closed systems. The butane is never exposed to the air during the normal extraction or the normal recovery process and it is recovered for reuse without a heat ignition source. The apparatus is a closed system and as long as the system is closed, you should not have any issues to deal with. When the valves are opened, there is a safety Quick Disconnect that continues to seal the unit if a line or tank is not connected to receive the solvent. Due to the fact that no pumps or heat is needed to extract or recover the solvent, you will not have to deal with boiling solvent fumes and sparks or flames to ignite a solvent if an accident should occur. The manual is very descriptive and is almost a book guide into a new area of extraction. A mini course in itself. It is a subject that we all have to learn to use just like any upgrade in technology.
 

Do I need a permit to operate a laboratory or Tamisium Extractor?

I am not required to submit records for purchases in any State nor is the Tamisium controlled in Texas as is other laboratory apparatus. It is up to the end consumer to obtain the proper licenses and permits in the state or country they reside in. Contact your local Dept of Public Safety or your State Health and Safety agency for more information. In Texas contact 512-424-2481 and ask for Jeanne Malone. You will be pleasantly surprised at how very helpful and encouraging Jeanne Malone and the State of Texas can be. I am sure the same goes for any State Agency.
 

Is Butane safe to use for consumable products?

Acute Toxicity Level
N-BUTANE (106-97-8)

Non Toxic: inhalation.

Absolutely. Butane is non toxic and evaporates completely.
It is used as a propellant in non stick cooking sprays because it mixes with the oils and carries them out of the canister better than other propellants, and it evaporates easily leaving a non toxic fume in the air that quickly dissipates away. When used as a propellant, as much as 25% of the volume of the canisters is filled with butane. It has been used for over 100 years to extract out topicals and consumables for exactly that reason. For decades, butane has been used to not only manufacture, flavorings, fragrances, and food additives but it has been used to deliver those food direct to your kitchen skillet. You can use it to extract topical and internal medicine, perfumes and oils. Especially oils. It is the holy grail of organic solvents and really shines with aromatic fragrances and oils, especially volatile oils/essential oils. Butane is the only solvent that will extract the aromatic and total essence of some flowers such as lily of the Nile.
Component Carcinogenicity
None of this product's components are listed by ACGIH, IARC, NTP, DFG or OSHA.
 

Is Butane State or Federally Regulated?

U.S. Federal Regulations
None of this products components are listed under SARA Section 302 (40 CFR 355 Appendix A), SARA Section 311/312 (40 CFR 370.21), SARA Section 313 (40 CFR 372.65), CERCLA (40 CFR 302.4), TSCA 12(b), or require an OSHA process safety plan.

U.S. State Regulations
The following components appear on one or more of the following state hazardous substances lists:

Is Butane harmful or toxic?

Due to the fact that butane would rapidly evaporate if inhaled or consumed, inhaling it should be considered lethal. Inhalation of any concentrated gas alone could be potentially fatal. Butane can displace air/oxygen just like CO2 and that could cause asphyxiation. Breathe a mixture of natural air gases, not concentrated gases is a good rule of thumb. MSDS N-Butane full spec sheet. NFPA ratings give Butane a rating of 2 for Health, 4 for Fire and 0 for reactivity.

Butane is non toxic and evaporates completely after extraction. It boils at 32 degrees F and will rapidly evaporate after being exposed to 80F room temperature. If you get any on your skin or face you should wash it out immediately to be safe. You may not notice any burning or anything but it is better to be safe than sorry. I have had butane on my skin and my face and in my eyes and if I did not know it was butane, I would have though I was sprayed with very cold water. However, we all can react differently. So always use eye protection when using anything under pressure or potentially dangerous.
 

What is the polarity of butane?

Butane (C4H10) has no polar groups and no isomers.
Butane is NON POLAR all the way, which means you can use Butane as the only solvent if the chemical you want to extract is non polar as well. If not, then you will have to add another solvent to the butane before extracting. Amazingly enough, those solvent will mix with butane to perform the extraction and separate during the recovery of the butane. Solvent amounts added are determined by the saturation level of a particular plant component in a given solvent. Butane is composed only of carbon and hydrogen. It is non-polar. It has no net ionic charge. Polar molecules can dissolve polar molecules and non-polar molecules can dissolve non-polar molecules. The closer you can get the polarity to match up, the more efficient the extraction process will be.
 

Is Butane the only solvent needed for a complete extraction?

Sometimes, to perform a complete extraction of an herb or plant that contains components that are not polarity matched to butane, you will need a small amount of one or more other solvents such as ethanol/alcohol or acetone. This is to be added to the butane before you begin the extraction process. This is the remarkable feature of using butane in the Tamisium Extractor. Because you can add these other solvents in a variety of combination's. The components you can extract from plants is virtually unlimited. And you can extract several chemicals from the same plant in one extraction or isolate the extraction to one chemical in most cases.
 

How do you know which solvents to use if butane is not the one required?

Solvent choice is determined by two factors.
Chemical Saturation Point, of a chemical in a given solvent, and Chemical Polarity Matching of the solvent to the chemical being extracted.

Chemical Saturation point is the point at which a solvent will no longer dissolve a chemical.
You will need to know how much chemical resides in the plant you are extracting from and you will need to know how much solvent is required to dissolve all that chemical to extract it from the plant.

Solvent Chemical Polarity matching is something you will just have to figure out with each plant component you extract from. Most of the information is known already. You can look in an index or reference source such as a Merck index or type in polarity and name of chemical on the internet and find it there. You can also determine from more more mainstream extractions what is currently being used.
 

Why is Butane considered such a great solvent over other solvents such as CO2?

You do not need high volumes of solvents to extract when using butane as the carrier solvent because it condenses into a liquid at very low pressures. Other solvents such as CO2 require a minimum of 1400 psi to begin assuming any liquid form at all and as high as 10,000 psi before a semi liquid form is achieved. The less dense forming gas of CO2 requires much more volume in the containers holding it and the containers must be very heavily constructed to hold the high pressures required to condense it into a semi liquid which limits the volume of material one can extract from. It also requires expensive pumps and much experience and labor to perform an extraction. This type of labor is costly. The major drawback to using CO2 is cost of operation and equipment. Making products with CO2 therefore cost much more and the final product price must be higher. Higher prices do not denote higher quality as a rule anymore. Until butane, those higher prices had to be paid. Now a much lower production alternative can produce a higher quality product making some products more profitable and within reach of consumers.

When Butane is used as the primary solvent, such as is the case in most oil extractions, the extraction process really works well due to the fact that you are sending almost 4-5 volumes of LIQUID Butane through the plant material when only a 1/2 of a volume would be more than enough to dissolve all the oil contained in 5 gallons of most plant materials.
This allows for an extremely efficient extraction.
During testing, I have extracted as little as 2% more oil when making a second pass with clean recovered solvent, extracting from the same extracted plant material.

But most important is the fact that Butane boils at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it is non toxic and evaporates completely with minimal effort. The other primary solvent as well as the extracted out chemicals boil at much higher temperatures and will not evaporate with the butane. This allows you to separate the several chemicals very easily which is what makes using BUTANE as a carrier solvent so incredible. But when it can be used as the carrier solvent and the primary solvent as one, it really shines.
 

In oil extractions when using butane, how can I get all the butane out as the oil thickens.

There should be no butane in the extract if you recovered the butane properly. Adding a transport solvent before beginning extraction, should assist in the recovery of all the butane because it changes the viscosity of the oil extracted and allows the molecules of butane to leave more easily while warmed during the recovery process. Adding a Transport Solvent should be all that is needed to remove any butane should any be left behind after recovery of the butane solvent. A Rotary Evaporator is another common tool in use. You can use your freezing Recovery Tank as the vacuum needed so that any butane evaporated away while using the RE, can be saved.

Having butane remain in the extract is no problem in regards to toxicity. We actually use Butane as our transport solvent. You have to freeze all containers and tanks before opening and transporting butane in this way. But when you do, you can deal with it as any other liquid not under pressure. Dropping the temperature of Butane below 32F reduces the relative pressure to zero. This is the reason butane alone does not work well as a gas cooking fuel or lighter fuel.
Remember that Butane is added as a propellant to spray cooking oils.

Warming the extract up is another alternative. It will not need to be warmed more than 110F. Never use an open flame or heating element. Immerse the holding tank in warmed or cool water to warm the solvent above freezing or use a heating plate with a spacer and check the temperature with a laser thermometer. Only evaporate flammable solvent in a well ventilated area. The problem with open evaporation is frost tends to leave water deposits in the extract.

As more question come in, more questions and answers will be posted.