Improve Your Labs Efficiency

Managing any laboratory is an unenviable task. With so much to think about – meeting deadlines, maintaining equipment, keeping costs down – it can be all too easy to take your eye off the ball.

For cryo-storage facilities in particular, that’s why it’s so important to make sure your lab’s running efficiently. After all, it’s not just about economising or streamlining – it’s about maintaining the highest standards, guaranteeing the safety of your employees and ensuring the security of your samples.

These are our top tips to help you avoid the hidden costs of inefficiency.

Cut your liquid nitrogen usage.

It may sound strange from one of the UK’s leading suppliers of liquid nitrogen, but we’d always help you look for ways you can use less. Not only would that reduce one of your biggest ongoing costs, but using less and making fewer deliveries is also better for the environment – helping you hit sustainability targets.

But how can you reduce the amount used? It comes down to making the right choices.

Choose your equipment carefully.

Your lab’s equipment is crucial to its efficiency. It might be tempting to go for the initial saving cheaper equipment offers, but if it’s not right for what you need – or worse still, not fit for purpose – it can cost you a great deal more in the long run. That’s especially true with cryo-freezers.

For example, a cryo-freezer adapted from one designed for liquid storage, or that stores the liquid nitrogen in a jacket with a dry vapour storage area may cost less to buy, but with a small reservoir it uses more LN2 through evaporation and calls for a fill more frequently (every 1-2 days, rather than every 4-7 days with an efficient vapour storage freezer). The freezer’s design is also fundamentally compromised, giving it a hold time of just 2-4 days rather than the 13-21 days of an efficient vapour freezer. So in addition you’ll need cover over holiday periods to ensure sample safety.

Suddenly, it’s easy to see how the inefficiencies – and the costs – can easily mount up.

Maximise your use of space.

For many labs and clinics, space is at a premium – so it’s important to use that space to best advantage, as a well-organised lab will always be more efficient. It’s not just a case of keeping it tidy though - in many cases, efficient use of space can depend on your choice of equipment.

All too often, our team has come across lab storage rooms packed with dewars, spread across the floor, using up valuable space and making managing and accessing samples difficult. Not only that, they need manual filling with liquid nitrogen – increasing the likelihood of spills, risking the safety of operators and damage to the floor – plus they usually need individual alarms retro-fitting separately.

In contrast, investing in freezers designed for high quantity long-term sample vapour storage down to -190˚C – such as those from MVE that we recommend – can pay dividends. Advanced features such as automated monitoring and auto-fill, and internal carousels that bring samples up to the operator for easier access with less stretching, not only streamline operations and make sample management simple, but allow larger volumes of samples to be stored in a similar footprint (or similar quantities in a smaller footprint) to make the most of the space available.

Reduce the risks to samples.

Making the right choice of equipment also has one other very important benefit – improving the security of your samples.

The best liquid nitrogen freezers offer reassuringly long freezer hold times – for example, the MVE HEco™ Series has between 13 and 27 days – increasing safety margins with uninterrupted preservation and allowing much more time to respond to issues such as power failure. MVE freezers use advanced insulation technology to maintain an exceptionally uniform temperature profile throughout the freezer too.

So improving the quality and efficiency of your freezers, and your lab, can have an extremely positive impact not just on running costs and productivity, but also on your reputation.

Think about layout and location.

Often, lab efficiency can be improved just by considering the layout – making sure frequently-used equipment is easily accessible, there’s space to move around easily and so on. But with cryo-labs especially, location and layout can be crucial to reducing running costs too.

If you have the option to reconfigure your existing space – or better still, have the opportunity to create a new lab space – making sure your freezers are as close to the source of liquid nitrogen as possible is key.

The best possible location is to have your lab on the ground floor against an external wall, with space outside for a storage tank that can be easily accessed for deliveries. That would mean a short pipeline (most installations use an SIVL or Super Insulated Vacuum Line) with consistent pressures and minimal liquid nitrogen losses during filling, and a basic ventilation/extraction system, as opposed to a complex (and expensive) HVAC set-up. it also means no more inefficient (and potentially dangerous) practices like having to move extremely heavy LN2 storage vessels around the building! 

Ask for expert help.

Of course, these are all ideal scenarios, and every lab is different – but there’s every chance you might be able to improve some aspects of efficiency. Truth is though, there are nearly always ways around seemingly insurmountable issues by taking a different approach. Something the Air Products Biomedical team are well-versed in.

For many customers, our experts have managed to improve their lab efficiency in ways they never thought possible, streamlining their processes and reducing their running costs considerably.

To find out more, simply talk to any of the Air Products team