Dear Colleagues, To those that requested info on the sheath and waste tank containment; I also did essentially what Alice Givan describes however I used a hardwood container that I built myself to the dimensions that would contain a 20L Cube and simply extended the sheath and waste lines (fluid and electric). One note, a little trial and error was involved since the first container I made out of laminate, exploded. Gene/UCONN Health (GO HUSKIES!!!!) --- You wrote: Is it worth the $2450 to not have to empty/fill the fluids every couple of hours? --- end of quote --- We think it is really useful not to have to empty and fill the FACScan tanks every few hours (this was the frequent way that users came to grief by putting kinks into the tubes or not tightening the lids etc etc). BD really should have made these tanks capable of holding a day's supply of sheath fluid. To get around this problem --- we have bypassed the FACScan fluid reservoirs with a large stainless steel tank that sits on the floor (couldn't cost $2450) and another large plastic container that gets the drip from the waste (certainly couldn't cost $2450). This was the single best thing we ever did to keep the instrument working without intervention. The stainless steel tank is pressurized by the old air line. What we don't have is any way to electronically monitor whether the tanks are empty or full. We do this by visually looking at the level in the plastic waste tank. When it reaches a certain line marked by a high tech piece of red tape, we know that the stainless steel tank needs filling and the waste tank needs simultaneous emptying. It's worked fine --- with a minor glitch because you need to make sure that the pressure is high enough to keep the sheath tank flowing. We have installed an in-line pressure guage -- and keep the pressure at about 6.0 psi (with a regulator inside the right hand side of the instrument). The standard 4.5 psi was a bit too low to keep the sheath flowing from a tank on the floor. Alice Alice L. Givan Englert Cell Analysis Laboratory of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center Dartmouth Medical School Lebanon, New Hampshire NH 03756 tel 603-650-7661 fax 603-650-6130 givan@dartmouth.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Apr 03 2002 - 11:53:19 EST