In this post I’d like to discuss the benefits of running routine maintenance procedures on your Biotage® 5000 Extractor system. There are a whole host of reasons you should be running routine maintenance on your extractor, the biggest of which is the cost savings from expensive repairs that might be needed if the instrument breaks down. Ensuring there is no cross contamination between samples, maintaining optimal performance, and prolonging the life of the instrument are a few other reasons why a small amount of your time now can lead to huge benefits down the road.

In the world of environmental testing, many labs encounter extremely dirty samples. For example, EPA Method 1664B is the protocol for extracting oil and grease from wastewater samples. More often than not, these types of samples are really dirty, requiring loads of pre-filters, glass wool, and filter aid in order to get the entire liter of water through the disk. Well, there is!

It is easier to understand something when you know what the actual word means. A thermistor is a portmanteau (yes, sometimes I do pay attention to linguistics) of the words thermal and resistor. This means that when a thermistor is heated, its resistance is either increased or decreased based on the properties of that particular thermistor.