In the first instance, the conditions of Schmid et al., were followed. As documented in the literature, and confirmed in our set-up, [Ru(bpy)3](PF6)2 cannot perform this reaction in any of the four solvents investigated (Table ). In light of our recent work, where we showed that increasing the reaction time of the pinacol reaction from 2 h to 24 h can lead to substantial increases in reaction yield, we conducted the reactions using each of Ir(ppy)2