By Vvon Engineering Team | Published | Updated
Investigate how humidity, dust, electrical supply and maintenance affect laboratory reliability, using manufacturer limits, site records and a practical inspection programme.
Scientific & laboratory RFQ checklist (TXT)
Humidity, dust and electrical disturbances can contribute to premature instrument faults. They are possible causes to investigate alongside component defects, installation, operating practice and maintenance history. Record the symptoms and site conditions before attributing a failure to any one cause.
The harm comes less from high humidity than from moving between conditions. A laboratory air conditioned during the working day and switched off at night and over the weekend spends every Sunday morning bringing warm, wet air into contact with surfaces that are still cool. Water then condenses where nobody can see it: inside a housing, on a board, on the underside of an optic.
Maintain the manufacturer’s specified temperature and humidity limits, including while the instrument is stored or idle. Avoid condensation when equipment moves between environments. Follow the approved standby and shutdown procedure; leaving every instrument energised or improvising a heated enclosure is not a universal humidity-control solution.
Brick dust, road dust and construction dust are finer and more abrasive than the dust most equipment is designed around, and the dry season delivers months of it without interruption.
Use the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule as the baseline. Document any shorter interval justified by dust loading, operating hours or inspection findings, and agree changes with the supplier where required. Do not bypass protective covers or service restrictions to clean an instrument.
Voltage sags, surges and interruptions can disrupt operation or damage susceptible equipment. Correlate the failure with recorded supply events and the manufacturer’s input limits; a failed board alone does not identify the electrical cause.
Select protection from the instrument load, site power-quality survey and required shutdown time. UPS topology, surge protection, earthing and any isolation transformer serve different purposes. A UPS does not necessarily provide galvanic isolation, and its compatibility with motors, chillers and generators must be checked by a qualified electrical designer.
Every item below takes minutes. Every one of them, left undone, ends instruments.
Write the list, put a name and an interval against each line, and review it at a fixed point every month. A log with a name in it survives staff changes. Institutional memory does not.
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