Turning Vodka into Diethyl Ether

"A brand new, never before opened bottle of...." 😂

An undergraduate student working close to me decided to evaporate off some diethyl ether by holding an open round bottom flask (RBF) over a Bunsen Burner. Inevitably the ether ignited. She was hand holding the RBF, which was overflowing flames onto her hands. She held it for a while, not knowing what to do, and then threw the flask resulting in a lab fire. Take care with ether!

I used to have a collumn with the glass beads in, I wasn't sure how much difference it made til I broke it and switched to a normal vigreux. Turns out they actually do make quite a difference! They're super easy to break when cleaning though.

Cyanoacrylate glue works pretty well to repair broken pestles. Mine broke similarly and glued it with CA glue it lasts many years before you have to re-glue it.

The glass bead fractional columns are AMAZING. They can be noisy but man they work well

Pro tip: Store your diethyl ether in an aluminium bottle at room temperature. It will build up a bit of pressure and you'll loose a few microliters every time you open it, but that way you don't have to put it in a freezer/refrigerator and especially don't have to let it warm up to room temperature before using it (to avoid condensation. This is applicable to everything, if you don't let it warm up to RT before opening it, condensation will build up and your product will take up moisture). Of course except if you live somewhere with temperatures much above 30 °C... Then I would put it in a fridge, but only an EX certified one! Don't put flammable substances in non EX certified fridges... It can end badly... With a fridge getting blown through a wall and spreading the chemicals inside it everywhere... You really don't want that to happen... If you're lucky with the climate and your lab AC and heating is bad, your ether boils in the summer and your DMSO freezes in the winter 😂

Everytime one of this guys videos appears on my youtube i get so excited.

Good to see people replacing that one chemist that we all loved.

NileRed reference :D "Brand new, never before opened"

For a better yield, use the sieves the ethanol was stored over as the nucleation material for the dehydration step. Zeolite beads nucleate even better than silica quartz. There's no need to separate the dust from the sieves. The drying power of the sieves would itself help drive the equilibrium forward. And you get back the ethanol that would've been lost to adsorbtion into the macro-scale porosity of the beads. (Only water can enter the pores in the zeolite crystal matrix itself, but you do lose some amount of any other material to the larger-scale porosity between different crystal grains.)

If you want to get 100% ethanol, you should minimise contact with air and store it under argon (better in Schlenk tube). When I tried to get absolute ethanol by triple azeotrope (benzene, water and ethanol), even doing inert distillation I got only 95% ethanol, because it is very hygroscopic

I’m so happy YouTube recommended your channel to me. You’ve got an excitement and sense of humor that I really like. 😊

Thank you for posting this informative video. And I really like your sense of humor!

Welcome to wonders of distillation. With something like 6 plates or so you never get close to 95% from 40% in a single go. The key is to adjust temperature to keep the flow not too high ie. column reflux ratio higher. Often it is quicker to make a couple faster distillations at higher flow rate than a single very high reflux rate distillation. Distillation seems so simple in theory but when you look more closely into it, you quicky notice you always get a mixture with the unwanted components.

1:05 i love the NileRed inside joke you've put in :D

Kolumne frakcyjną polecam owijać kawałkiem koca a nie folią aluminiową. Folia sprawia że kolumna nie ma gradientu temperatur (za bardzo się nagrzewa na całej długości) - zwłaszcza te specyficzne „chemland’owe” z kuleczkami. Owinięcie kocem daje perfekcyjną separacje destylowanych frakcji.

Fantastic video mate thanks for sharing 😊

Thank you, I studied Chemistry, but never worked with it, now I'm thinking about making my own garage lab, and your channel is a inspiration to me.

You know you're watching a real chemist when he uses the Lego ice cubes for his ice bath

"Brand new, never before opened bottle of vodka" sounds familliar... I don't know why...