I'm going to be purchasing a laboratory distillation kit here pretty soon, the kit includes everything I need for the setup but the condenser requires a water pump to circulate cold water around the coils. What kind of pump would you recommend for this purpose?
A small centrifugal pump that has the flowrate designated by the condenser manufacturer. I assume it has a heat exchanger of some type to reject the heat to the air and that would need a designate flow. Anyway, look in any lab supply catalog or web site and they will have many small pumps. You do not need to carefully control the flowrate, so stay away from metering or peristaltic pumps. The pumps may even be made of plastic, that is fine for this application. In my lab, we would just run the water from the tap through the glass condenser and let it drain out to waste. It is wasteful of water, but it sure was much cheaper than buying a pump and heat exchanger.
The only thing you might need a pump for is if you are distilling/refluxing something and it is not all condensing before it reaches the end/top of the tube, resulting in vapor escaping. In that case you would use a bucket of ice water with a submersible pump.
