Australia's Science Forum

As we are not a government school nor do we belong to the Independent Schools Assoc, we have a huge bill annual for Chemwatch. I am wondering what other schools do in our situation and if there is any cheaper alternative to Chemwatch?

Kathryn

Just doesn't make sense. All schools have to follow WH&S procedures so why do some schools pay huge bills.
Same problems with chemicals, same GHS labeling, so how can you access same information without the price tag!!

I think the AIS has a subscription that we have access to as members?!

Chem Supply have website for SDS

I have a friend working in industry and they use "information safe". It can apply to business and home. May be worth a look.

www.infosafe.com (I think that's the website).

I get the majority of my SDS's from the Chem Supply site. It's sort of on speed dial. What I can't trace through there I use Science Lab.com as back up. I use the DIGGERS site for SDS's on methylated spirits and kerosene which I usually buy from Bunnings. The infosafe site is a paying site. For making labels I use the labelmaker sold by Omega Scientific. Check the online catalogue.

Science Supply have a link to chem supply MSDS. Go to msds and click on download. I dont use chemwatch as I am yet to make it user friendly (following the helpful hints on chemtalk).

UNFORTUNATELY, If you are required to keep your manifest on Chemwatch, as many Catholic schools are now, you have to be able to FIND what you want on Chemwatch data base before you can enter it into the manifest. This isn't too bad - jsut have to send a request and they eventually put the item into your 'unfiled' folder..
BUT this means you actually have to fight with the program. I have had issues over the last week, where when I enter the Manifest mode, all my quantities are reset to zero! I have had hours onto livechat, even working back past my finishing time. They 'escalated it to supervisor then to their IT then I was on the phone wit their IT and had to give them permission to access my computer. It was FIXED after 2.5 hrs.
Yesterday morning I logged into CW expecting to be able to breeze through it- problem back again, and then I realized one main folder had been deleted!
You can recover those, but it is one folder at a time.
The stress of CW is enough for me to have the next 2 years off until I retire!

All suppliers, by law, have to provide a SDS for their product. Most do this by providing them on their websites. But if you have trouble locating one, check with the company you purchased the product from, they should also be able to help.

I'm just updating our SDSs and found the SDS for Dispirin on Chemwatch. It all looked good until I started reading down the page and found it actually had no information - every category just stated not known or not applicable. I instead went to the manufacturer's website and downloaded something with real information. The moral is, don't trust everything on Chemwatch.

To add to my previous comment. I just searched for a brand of dishwasher tablets on CW and it states "Non-hazardous". Guess what? Went to the manufacturer's website and sure enough, as you would expect, they are listed as "Hazardous". Not happy.

Thanks everyone - I think unless we can get a discount rate, we will not renew our subscription. Labbie - I find that unusual that Chemwatch has something as non-hazardous when the manufacturer had it as hazardous. I've usually found Chemwatch to err far to much on the side of caution and label things as hazardous when they shouldn't be.

Kathryn

Hi,

Here at the school I work in we use ChemWatch to print off the SDS sheets needed and also labels for our bottles, jars etc. The ChemWatch programme has become extremely expensive to access and I am wondering what company you use to obtain these sheets and labels to adhere to our legal requirements

Thank you.
Linda
Tyndale Christian School SA

I believe Chemwatch is the only company in Australia. We in NSW use it, as it is the ONLY ONE.

Hi all.

Many of your responses answer the question I asked today about using an alternative to ChemWatch because of the huge expense now having to pay to have access to it. Thank you also. If I had seen this post earlier I would not have needed to submit a post myself.

Linda.