28 DIY Science: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments
If you’re on a tight budget, you can get along with less than
the recommended basic glassware by washing and reusing
glassware during a lab or by modifying the quantities we used
or the equipment setups I describe. For example, in one lab
you will distill 100 mL of ethanol from one flask to another. By
reducing the quantity of ethanol to 10 mL, you can substitute
a setup using test tubes rather than flasks. Similarly, many of
the labs can be done microscale using reaction plates and Beral
pipettes rather than the test tubes or beakers that I used. Even
if you can’t afford to buy all the basic glassware I recommend,
don’t let that stop you. You can manage, one way or another, by
substituting and making do.
I maintain a current list of vendors of laboratory glassware,
equipment, and chemicals at http://www.homechemlab.com/
sources.html. Check that page before you order any glassware,
equipment, or chemicals.
At the expense of some inconvenience and accuracy, you can
economize on glassware by using nonstandard procedures.
For example, rather than buying a volumetric flask or flasks,
you can use your 10 mL and 100 mL graduated cylinders as ad
hoc volumetric flasks. Your results won’t be quite as accurate,
but they won’t be terribly far off, either. Similarly, if there’s
no room in the budget for a burette to do titrations, you can
RECommENdEd LABoRAToRy GLASSwARE
substitute a $1 Mohr or serological pipette. The pipette is less
convenient to use for a titration than the burette, but if you
work carefully, your results can be as accurate with the pipette
as they would have been with the burette. You can even
substitute a calibrated Beral pipette, and do your titration
by counting drops.The items listed in Table 3-3 are useful additions to the basic
glassware kit. None of them are absolutely necessary, but all
of them make things easier, both for the laboratory sessions
in this book and for other experiments you may do on your
own. You will also find it helpful to increase the numbers of
the frequently used items in Table 3-2, especially beakers,
Erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes, pipettes, and graduated cylinders.
For example, my home lab has at least half a dozen beakers and
Erlenmeyer flasks in each of the sizes I use most often, a dozen
serological pipettes, several dozen test tubes, and half a dozen
graduated cylinders.Having more than the required minimum on hand allows for
some breakage, and also speeds up lab work. For example, if you
have only one 10 mL graduated cylinder, you might have to wash
and dry it in the midst of a lab session. If you have extras, you
can simply rinse and set them aside as you use them and wash
all of them thoroughly at the end of the session.Table 3-2 lists my recommendations for a basic set of laboratory glassware. With only these
items, you can complete all of the laboratories in this book.