#1 Science Forum For Lab Technicians

I have been buying our stopwatches from Hart Sports - a LOT cheaper, and they are long lasting. They do have models with button batteries, but also some with CR2032 which are easy to change out.

We do this, but we ALWAYS use a heating mantle rather than a bunsen burner.

So sad, they were a great source of specimens.

I keep it very simple - just the date; date it appears on our budget & the reference number; supplier and details (chemicals, equipment, etc.); amount; and amount left to spend for the year.

oh, ok. Ours are a white plastic and lots of the rounded base bits are melted (from before I started here). Maybe I should look into replacing with better quality plastic ones! We have the white plastic ones too and luckily only a few suffered from hot test tubes. We kept our very old timber ones w...

Have you looked up the Science ASSIST site? Below is a snippet from their AIS Microbiology Guidelines: "7.2 Environmental sampling When sampling from the environment, the microorganisms collected are not identified. It is therefore important to sample from environments that are not likely to co...

We just bought some from MTA, they seem to be working well so far. Plastic, with the counter, and adjustable handle.

I used to have to walk across to the other side of the school to use a colour printer, and there was a black & white one here in my block. Now however, after years of begging, we have a colour printer here in the block!!! So exciting!!! Handy hint when sending anything - but especially labels - ...

We don't use a lot of it, so we buy the 500mL bottles of 30% and dilute as necessary for the weaker solutions.
The amount of waste we save doing it this way more than makes up for the higher $$$/litre.

I have an electric pressure cooker here. At my old school I had an old one that I used to just put on the magnetic stirrer/hotplate for a while and hope for the best... Any recommendations for settings, times etc for an electric one? If you look up Science Assist they have an AIS on sterilising aga...

So it has been hectic around here lately, sorry I didn't get to this earlier. Attached (if it works) are a few photos of our gas harvesting setup. We use it for oxygen and hydrogen and it makes the task so much easier!
Note: the tub should be full of water, and I use a gas jar to catch the gas.
M

Ours all go straight into the skip. Our skips are emptied at random, so there is no need to freeze them and wait until bin day.

Well done bigmack. When I started here I had a similar problem - lots of waste in the storeroom and nothing in the budget to pay for disposal. So I did my research and bit by bit disposed of what I could. By the time I was done, I could afford to pay a contractor to dispose of what was left. My bigg...

We have just started using the denture tablets, and for what we do the blue colour change doesn't matter at all. Otherwise we use aspro clear which you can get at a reasonably cheap price from Chemist Warehouse.

Wow, I guess I haven't realised how lucky we are - one of the few advantages of being rural. We get our hearts, lungs, plucks, digestive tracts and eyeballs FREE!!! from the local abattoirs. We do have to buy brains, but I have discovered which of our local butchers get the frozen ones that are wrap...

I work in a DEC school, and all of our accounts MUST be in the school name and use the school email address. I can still log in as usual, as I set the account up. Also, setting it up this way is much easier if I have an extended period of leave and someone else needs to order while I am away. As for...

When ours arrived, there are 3 labs which have a dais in front of the board, so the stand obviously wouldn't fit there. It took our TSO 2 full days to get a work order allowing them to be installed onto the wall instead of a stand! The rest will be wall mounted eventually, within the next 9 months o...

To harvest oxygen and hydrogen easily, we have a dedicated setup for each. Burette into the stopper of a side arm conical flask dispensing the H2O2 or the 5M HCl. In the flask is either the MnO2 or Mg ribbon. We then bubble the gas out through a water bath and a beehive and into the container we nee...

Hi labbassistant, if you have several items needing repairs and parts you might want to give Bob Death a call - he does a great job and doesn't charge the earth for it.

Have you tried SSA? They are very well priced for any of the chemicals I have looked up, and may be the same for mercury.