May someone please clarify what is used to preheat the ethanol in a continuous feed rotary evaporator setup? Round bottom flask on heating mantle w/ stirrer? Please describe.
I can see where preheating might help, but it is not a necessary part of the process.
not trying to be a dick about it, but which part of “round bottom flask on heating mantle w/stirrer” do you not understand?
I am referencing an SOP that states to utilize an intake preheater. I assumed the flask on a heating mantle and was looking to clarify as to the whether or not that is the most appropriate solution. No offense taken.
Gotcha. It did seem pretty weird to be looking at a continuous feed rotovap, but needing a description of a flask/mantle/stirrer combo.
do you have a link to the SOP (can you share it?)?
The RBF/mantle solution would certainly work, but would presumably require a flask/mantle combo (several times) larger than your rotovap RBF to be of any practical use (so yeah, I see why you would question that).
just looping the feed-line into the rotovap water bath (or any water bath) would seem like a more scalable solution. this could be as simple as using a longer flexible feed hose and just looping it into the bath, or could use a separate water bath and an immersion coil. eg 25' Stainless Steel Immersion Coil - BREWinternational
the advantage of warming just the feed line is that your product doesn’t spend hrs and hrs at temp.
or you could take inspiration from this piece of performance art and get a toaster oven involved 
Stainless wort chiller from ebay in a heated bath.
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I believe full points requires something more along the lines of this
in a toaster oven…but I’ve been wrong before 
you could probably fit something like this below your boiling flask in your rotovap heating bath
That’s nifty
something more like this is probably a better fit for under the rotovap boiling flask, but the build quality isn’t as good, and I was looking for something striking to go in the toaster oven, not fit well in the roto bath.
