Frequently Asked Questions

All items that we buy or you buy from any other country will require payment of shipping, customs fees, bond fees, security fee, forwarding service, duties, import brokers fees  and tariffs. We often experience shipping or customs delays when shipping by sea. Once we receive the products we undertake third party, peer reviewed engineering and certification to allow the lawful use of the products in states that require ASME or Underwriters Laboratory (UL) certification. We include all of these additional costs in our pricing which you will need to pay separately if you buy direct from Ali Baba.

A short path distillation still is a great tool to learn the fractional distillation process, perform small scale production, and also great for research & development or formulation work. The wiped film distillation units are better overall units for consistency of output and is less dependent on operator skill to produce the target molecular fraction. Wiped film units are also better suited to continuous operation in a production environment. Key information to know in selecting the proper size wiped film distillation still is to know the feed rate of source material you have available or total raw material you need to run each shift, day or week.

A rotary evaporator is a great tool for solvent recovery in a batch process methodology. The size of the rotary evaporator and your ability to pull a deep vacuum while maintaining a significant temperature differential between the mother liquor and the condenser coils will determine the maximum solvent recovery per hour. Typically our clients move up to a falling film evaporator when they need a greater volume of solvent recovery in a shorter time, or they run out of floor space / electrical power for banks of rotary evaporators, and their associated chillers and vacuum pumps. Falling film evaporators also require significant current, but they use it more efficiently relative to the rate of solvent recovery.  

Both the Buchener funnel and filter trolley will complete the same task of filtering your mother liquor prior to solvent recovery. The biggest advantage of the filter trolley is that they come in larger sizes for faster filtration of larger volumes of material.

A forced air drying oven can be used for decarboxylation of plant material and for drying isolate or making edibles, where a vacuum oven is used for final purging of any residual solvents in specific consumer products made without filtration or solvent recovery processes.