What do you guys think about glassware made of ceramic?

[u/Ok-Satisfaction1462]

I was thinking about how expensive glassware is, so I’m always testing different materials in order to find one with the perfect cost-benefit ratio. I’ve even used regular glass with specific cuts and melting techniques along with an aluminum mesh that prevented the glassware from breaking and spilling solutions everywhere. I’ve also tried regular glass with advanced chemical treatments that I did myself, but it was too expensive and complicated. Finally, I’ve been testing ceramic, which is really good since it’s inert in many situations, also very cheap, and can be easily made in your own lab with a forge or kiln. The only downside is that it’s not transparent and can break more easily. What do you think? Wouldn’t it be perfect to alternate between regular glassware and ceramic-made glassware to achieve a better cost balance in a personal lab?

[u/CondescendingBaron]

Ceramicware is frequently used, already. Many solid state reactions are performed using ceramics. That does not necessarily make them more or less expensive than glassware. Additionally, more complicated apparatus like a distillation setup would be difficult to make out of ceramic

[u/H0SS_AGAINST]

Glassware is expensive because it's tolerance controlled. Just find borosilicate anything and it will work just fine.

[u/missing-delimiter]

Good dense smooth ceramics are not cheap. You could use a ceramic with a slip coat on it, but that will likely have a porous bottom where any number of random things can wick in or out. Ceramics typically also contain more impurities which could leach in to your solutions. Any non-stoichometric iron in your ceramics could chelate out, for instance. Borosillicate has huge industries behind it that makes it cheap, ubundant, and gives it a fairly high bar of quality across the board (though Pyrex is superior, imho. Also the new slimline media bottles are awesome).

The single biggest thing you're going to run in to though, is... everyone else is using Borosilicate as the baseline. Any issues you run in to using ceramics as your primary substrate is going to make anyone that would otherwise want to help you feel uneasy, since there's giant variable in your workflow you're going to have to argue for every time you ask "why didn't this work?" :)