Incubator cleaning - what chemical (Sep/02/2008 )

We suspect there is something no good in our culture incubator, because sometime air smell strange when incubator door open.

Our incubator is an old model, there is no self-sterilization function.

We have spread ethanol (70%) couple times and its' not working.

Is there any stronger chemical we can use (we will move culture dish out) to sterilize our incubator?

Thanks

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depends, we also do it with ethanol,...but the best thing is to ask the company who sold it to you. e-mail them. I know that some people also use sodium azide.

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Read this really carefully and choose any of them.

What we do is take the parts out. . wash them, wipe with alcohol and that's it. No problem yet.

But, for persistent problems. . see this thread http://www.protocol-online.org/forums/inde...aning+incubator

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Now we got it, medium in some dished get cloudy in 6 hours.

Can anyone tell me why only some dishes (4 of 18) got it, if there is problem of incubator?

Or it is another way around, our culture dish already had problem that cause the strange smelling in our incubator. The smell begin Saturday, and cloudy occure Tuesday.

Our head of post-doc not willing to do anything until we figure out what went wrong.
How do we pin point the problem? what test can tell us the problem?

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Dom in that thread had said that one frequently overlooked problem is technique.

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There are following reasons for the smelling from incubator.

1) check the incubator for medium spillage in side the incubator.
2) clean with it hypochloride.
3) Your medium may be deteriorate due to low humidity inside incubator. check humidity
4) Is there any deep spillage of medium in side incubator.

Can you explain why smell is comes on satureday only?

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Do you have any filter on the way from the CO2 cylinder to the incubator?

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That is one potential problem I am thinking about.
Due to some problems of moving incubator to current position and very bad relative position between incubator and CO2 cylinder, that filter between cylinder and incubator has been removed.

Our head of post-doc does not believe CO2 sylinder can cause problem since it has been remove for 5 months, and I am not sure.
This cylinder linked 4 weeks ago (August 9th), could that be problem surface now?

For clean incubator with it hypochloride, what is the concentration should be?

All personal use that incubator used additional tray hold culture dished in case of spill and we move tray instead of dish in or out of incubator. Thus spillage into incubator is possible but currently is not on our top list of potential rproblem.
Actually only I feel the strange smelling, 3 other people use that incubator did not agree with me.
Now my nose become lab joke

What technique we should pay attention to to avoid future problem?

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Is there real contamination or just the smell? U mentioned of contamination .. is it is just the smell and only to U then there are better solutions

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Man!! my boss basically say the same thing, the biggest problem is my nose

Yes there is contamination we lost couple dishes (near a quarter of total), and everyone use that incubator lost some of dishes. One of the user lost all but 2 dishes (she originally have 22).

We just want to figure is incubator gone bad first and then it cost our culture dish?
or something happen in culture dishes first which lead to strange smell?

In any case, I think we have a good clean need to do.

By look the lab note and wrok schedul, we notice more than 80% of contaminated dishes used new serum that just prepare last Monday. However, not all dishes use new serum got contaminated.
How can we test the serum is good or bad?
Could that be a reason?

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