TheFertilizer
Well-Known Member
Exactly! My the stuff ''in'' my 90 bag is what went through the 185 bag and a 120 would make the stuff in the 90 bag nice to smoke.
I have 220 pyramid bag in the washing machine and then 220 - 185 - 90 - 70 - 38 bags and only smoke what's in the last two bags.
I'm thinking a system of 150 - 120 -90 - 70 - 25 would be better for my preferences and of course only smoke what went through the 150 bag, no need to have 3 different grades of crap hash that needs to be further extracted, and no need to have a seperator between 70 and 25, maybe even between 90 and 25.
Less bags to scrape wet hash out of makes it easier and faster
I think the washing machine is great, I just set the timer and do some other tasks while it washes
I think having more intermediate bags also effects overall yield, or at least yields of your finer grades. Because when you think about it, say all that material is going from the 220 into the 185 bag, and then into the 90. Well, as all the debris that got let through the 185 builds up into the 90 along with the trichomes, it's going to "clog" the mesh up faster, and impede some of your 70 and 38 sized trichomes going through. If instead there was a 150 between the 185 and 90, then less of that debris would make it through to the 90, allowing more of the 70 and 38 heads to pass unimpeded as well as making the 90 a more smokeable grade. That could also effect overall yield as well, because if more material is going into "smokeable" grades rather than being left behind in the non-smokeable grades, then you'll have a higher overall yield even though what you're really accomplishing is filtering more of the desired grades out of the coarser material. Pretty sure the only reason only 8 bags are common is because there's not a lot of intermediate stages you can get between 220 and 25 microns, and any more than that would be both impractical in terms of product filtering, and fitting them all into the same bucket. So with that in mind, your "debris bags" being the bags that catch unsmokeable stuff, could be the 90 and up bags on a 5 bag system, but 120 and up on an 8 bag system, by merit of the more efficient filtration.
Anyway, that's just my theory about it, and I think that the smaller-bag kits are probably offered as a preference thing for people who don't want to scrape up and dry 8 different grades, because I agree, that's kind of annoying. But I do think there is some advantage to more bags when really thinking about it. One thing I can't help relate it to is polishing metal... I use to be obsessed about putting mirror edges on a knife blade. One thing learned there is that you want to progress up through the grit ranges gradually, because each abrasive will leave scratches behind, and the larger the scratches the harder for a much finer stone to remove it to get that "mirror" effect. Likewise with this kind of filtration, with less bags, you're asking each bag to do more work.
From what I've seen with the 8 bag kit, there's verrrry little that actually gets caught up in the 190 and 160 debris bags. The 220, 190 and 160 filtration set is what i would then call the "debris bags" as the 120 begins the actual "bubble bags" where smokeable grade begins. Of course this could all vary with the quality of input product as well, so with some strains your "debris bags" and "bubble bags" might be separated by a different range, but I think you can still imagine it as a two step process. Your "debris bags" do the actual "filtering" and all that's caught in them is non-desirable plant material, and your "bubble bags" just do further sifting. If one really did want to streamline how many bags they had to scrape up out of, but didn't want to sacrifice quality or yield, then adding more "debris bags" (coarse grades) would be best in my opinion, and then your finer grades can be treated as preference for what level of separation you want.
So for example on my setup, I could probably ( and I am really speaking with absolutely no authority here, so take it with a grain of salt ) but I could probably keep just my 220-190-160-120-90 bags, and then skip my 73 and 43 but only put a 25 bag at the end of that, and I would effectively get the same yield I would have, but would not be sifting it all into separate grades and so would only have to scrape up off two different bags (the 90 and the 25). Personally, having seen the results in a 120x, I don't think most of the grades really merit that much separation, but again this could all vary by the input product.
Sorry starting blabbing and couldn't stop. Tl;dr... Take your last smokeable grade, and consider everything higher as "debris bags", and add more intermediate grades in these "debris bag" ranges to increase the yield of finer, smokeable grades.
