Personally if you are just starting I would look at a "reaction flask" at least. A flask with three, best four heads - do yourself a favor and dedicate the middle for a mechanical overhead stirrer, they're cheap as hell and will allow you to proceed with reactions you will have great trouble attempting with a stirrer plate, not only will they make those so much easier, but you get cooling from the rapid stirring, quicker mixing of reagents, quicker escape of gasses due to the movement (great for example NABH4, you add too much with slow stirring, it will foam up out of the flask, but you turn up the crank on that overhead stirrer and make it go nuts, the reaction will proceed faster and will push out the gas out of the flask).
For heating, a heating mantle. Cheap with no stirring, get a mechanical one like I said, the combo will cost you less than a fancy heating mantle with stirring possibility.
For cooling, try to get a large inner diameter, USED dewar container. You can load them up with some dry ice, put your flask in one if it is small enough (1-2L) and you have sub-zero cooling for hours and hours.
And the method in this thread is solid. Thanks
@btcboss2022 for posting it - I have used it myself, seems like a long time ago now.
If you are just a beginner in all this, at the end, don't separate the layers. No point in doing this. Do not use DCM either, you will have a hard time and a long time if you do not have a good source and good technique mastered, it is tough to work with for some. At the end, let the solution cool down after reflux, saturate all the water with salt (around 25g for every 100ml), check pH and add sodium bicarb slowly to raise the pH to near 7 - something around 4-5 should be good enough - the solution will be highly acidic, so it will be an exothermic reaction and it will foam up a lot, be careful (make sure you start when it has cooled down). The salt will make sure you won't pull much water with ethyl acetate which is a great substitute for DCM (remember EA will be on top, water on bottom, it does not behave like DCM). You shouldn't need much of the solvent anyway, the saturated salt water and the ketone after being lightly washed in alkaline should separate by itself. If you look past page 1 the author realized he was missing out on a lot of ketone by removing that layer, it was never fixed in the original post, but I remember myself the first time I tried this method, collecting that layer for later and adding NaOH followed by extraction; that worked too.
