Pipettor calibration - - how often, which company, how much? (Jun/01/2007 )
For those in the US/Canada, where do you send your pipettors for calibration? Do your universities have in-house staff doing that or do you have contracts with a company to do calibrations for all the labs on a routine basis?
How much do you pay per pipettor? And do you have your pipettors calibrated and checked once a year or twice a year?
How much do you pay per pipettor? And do you have your pipettors calibrated and checked once a year or twice a year?
We have a couple of small businesses (usually in small crews of 2-3 people) come around 2-3 times a year. They set up shop somewhere on campus and take orders from a number of labs. They charge ~$17/pipette for cleaning, 'basic' repairs and two point calibration. We have every pipette calibrated once a year.
Mail in services are expensive; the least expensive service I found (in a very limited search) was Midwest Scientific at about ~$30 per pipette.
we also get some people every month for such maintenance. They cost between 18 and 25$ per pipette.
Thank you Mondo and Scolix. I like it that you've managed to find a local business to do all your campus labs' pipette calibration. I have no idea if I can find one here. This is a small city and I'm just a graduate student and every lab in this campus does its own searching and paper work (and all the calling back and forth) when it comes to pipette calibration.
I'm in BC, Canada, BTW, if there are any who would like to recommend a local BC company.
If you want to, you could calibrate it yourself. In one of my friend's lab, everyone was taught or made to calibrate their pipettes.
We do it ourselves, even if it's quite time-consuming...
It depends on the policy of your lab.
You can be allowed to make calibrations on your own, but in some cases your lab already has a quality policy.
It will probabily include procedures and time-tables of instruments calibrations or the name of the people allowed to make calibrations.
How is the calibration done?
Here you'll find some useful information about calibration procedure, precision, accuracy etc. etc. etc.
That calibration protocol is similar to ours.
Here is the description of a calibration workstation. Some lucky people who have to calibrate pipettes on their own can rely on this kind of devices...