Having the right tools is essential for any profession. A chef cannot cook without knives, and a carpenter cannot build without a hammer. The same is also true for scientific researchers. Having the correct lab instrumentation to perform your experiments is key to publishing, and replacing or fixing these tools is not easy. Instruments tend to be challenging to maintain, and if they do break, it can be expensive and time consuming to repair. Part of having the right tools means having low-maintenance lab instruments, ensuring you will save time, money and energy in the lab, allowing you to focus on your research and make your next big breakthrough.
Save money with low-maintenance instruments.
Many leading lab instruments require you to spend money not just on the initial cost of the system, but also on an expensive maintenance contract. These annual contracts can cost upwards of $10K USD, while individual parts to fix instruments can cost an additional $5K+ USD. Paying for the cost of a technician to come on-site and repair an instrument can be an unnecessary expense, especially if the repair is simple and can be performed by the researcher themselves. Investing in an instrument with no annual maintenance contract and affordable replacement parts can save you money, allowing you to budget for more important expenses, such as lab staff, other instruments and supplies.
Get back to your experiments sooner with low-maintenance instruments.
We’ve all experienced the inconvenience of waiting around for a service technician, hoping to be able to get on with our day. When you’re a researcher, and an essential piece of lab equipment breaks down, this problem is amplified. It often means that your projects can grind to a halt, delaying important grant and publication deadlines. The time you spend waiting on technicians and organizing their service costs you valuable time that could be better spent working in the lab and actively performing research and analyzing data. One ideal solution to this model is to work with instruments that can be serviced by you from the comfort of your own lab, with support from experts available remotely as soon as necessary. When systems are low-maintenance and able to be fixed quickly, you save valuable time on your projects.
Look out for your health and prevent workplace stress.
One common yet seldom discussed side effect of broken lab instruments is the large amount of stress that researchers face. When you are working against tight deadlines, and with strict budgets, a broken or malfunctioning piece of lab equipment is the last thing you want to deal with, and can potentially lead to physical health issues. Increased workplace stress in scientific careers can lead to headaches and nausea, and can even lead to more serious problems like diabetes and fertility problems. By investing in low-maintenance equipment and reducing the amount of potential stress from equipment repairs, the likelihood of these problems is reduced, and you can return to being productive and happy in the workplace.
At Nicoya, we are passionate about making surface plasmon resonance instrumentation accessible to researchers. We ensure that lab instruments are low-maintenance so that researchers can save time, money and energy. Many companies will design instruments in increasingly complex ways, thus creating instrumentation that is more and more difficult to maintain, necessitating costly maintenance contracts. By using innovative nanotechnology, we improve on traditional SPR instruments and design instrumentation that is lower cost has no maintenance contracts and can be repaired by researchers in their own lab with remote assistance from our team of expert scientists.
Read what our customer Ember Tota (UCSD), has to say:
“The team at Nicoya has been very helpful, promptly answering any questions, helping me analyze data, troubleshooting issues, and helping me learn the ins and outs of how the instruments works. The initial training was very fast and simple.”
Ember Tota, UC San Diego
Work on your next scientific breakthrough using low-maintenance OpenSPR™.
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References
- Mind Matters: Stress, an Uninvited Lab Visitor Irene LevineJan-Jane HuAug-Mathilde HisAug-Gohar ManzarAug-Katie LanginAug – https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2009/01/mind-matters-stress-uninvited-lab-visitor