I know this thread is all about experimentation, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not that difficult to get the process to run at about 100 degrees. The closer and more accurate you can make it, the better, but if you’re off a bit but at least in the ball park, it generally results in better looking negatives than if you’re way off.
@drmoss_ca if this is largely being driven by trying to save time, I’ve found that sometimes simple things like order of operations makes all the difference in the world. Not saying you haven’t figured this out or couldn’t think of that, but you’d be amazed how often somebody points something out to somebody and they respond with “I didn’t think of that”.
that said, start heating your chems when you mix them, and do that part first. That way they can be coming up to temp while you’re doing everything else. An investment a plastic tub large enough to hold all your bottles and a sous vide cooker makes life 100 times easier. Just fill the tub, set the desired temp on the cooker, turn it on and star mixing up your chems and put the bottles in the water bath, then go prep your film for processing. Unless you’ve got some wonky bottles, they should be up to temp in 15-20 minutes, by then you should have your film in the tank and be preheating the tank. The actual process with the standard c-41 chems is less than 30 minutes to get to the final wash. I’ve found that it’s pretty simple and straightforward to run a batch from start to finish in about an hour. You can cut that down quite a lot by getting into the rapid access chemicals, which dramatically cuts your bleach and fix times down.
if 15-20 minutes to get up to temp is too long for you, then you can also start by filling the tub with the hottest water you can get from the tap and put the bottles in that with the cooker set at the desired temp then let it settle down to the desired temp, though, in my experience that doesn’t really shorten the time much, and I find that it takes me about 10-15 minutes to twincheck my film and get a batch loaded in a tank, and another ~5 minutes to start pre-heating the tank so my temperature drop going into the tank isn’t too large, and the two kind of converge so that the chems are at temp and my tank is ready to go at about the same time.
sure some of this means you gotta spend some money, but how much is your time worth? Spending a little cash to get a process that very consistently and reliably runs pretty correctly in about an hour saves how much more time elsewhere, like when scanning?