OK, what is the nature of your confusion?

1) If your substrate is an alkyl halide, you just want to look for a polar protic solvent (e.g. EtOH, H2O, CH3OH) and *heat*.
2) If you have an alcohol instead of an alkyl halide, look for a strong acid such as H2SO4 or H3PO4 (which have non-nucleophilic conjugate bases) and heat.

That’s pretty much it!

OK, glad you have found them helpful Minnoli!

An E2 – certainly, because it’s controlled by stereochemistry. A good example would be in some substituted cyclohexanes where there is only one hydrogen anti (trans) to the leaving group.

An E1 (the topic of this post) – the best situation would be one where only one alkene is possible as a product. For example the E1 reaction of C6H5-CH(OH)-CH3 would only give one alkene.

Otherwise, the selectivity is going to be determined by the difference in stability between the alkenes, and since that’s usually quite small, 70:30 or 80:20 ratios are common.

Yes, since HO- is a strong base, it will go down the E2 pathway instead of the E1 pathway.