It's been said here and elsewhere many times. A hot plate companion to your casting pot does, indeed make your job more productive. Cast up a couple thousand 40 cal boolits yesterday with my new used hotplate. In addition to preheating your mold, you can use it to preheat your ingots to keep production flow moving. Found when I took a break after reloading the cast pot, with the mold idling on the hot plate, there was no restart glitches in bullet quality.
A small expenditure that made a real difference.