banker

We really aren't doing any preventative maintanence. Immucor didn't recommend anything to us, which I know doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Maybe if we do PM it will help. What knid of preventatine maintanence are you all doing?

We process about 100 samples a day, is this close to how many samples the larger sites who have replied are processing. It could be that we are working the machines too hard. Keep your suggestions coming, and if anyone is having trouble like us, please let me know!

We use Virkon (which I believe is virtually the same as Rely-On) as Immucor instructed us to. No one uses bleach on any component of the machine. I agree that it seems something is "chewing up" the parts. Other than the possiblity that we got "lemons" I wonder if you think it's possible there is a problem with the saline. What brand do you use? We get an unbuffered saline then adjust the pH to 7.0 using the Immucor Phix Buffer. Is this the same process you use? Also, we decontaminate twice a month, do you think this might be contributing?

That message was meant for a previous post about positive screens having negative panels.

We have been using the Echo's for about a year and we have always had this problem. Large numbers of positive screens were run using the Ready ID only to find nothing there! To make matters worse, we would repeat the screen and often it would be negative. The reproducibility of these machines has been a huge problem for us.

We have been using Echo's for just over a year now and they break down constantly. We are a fairly large lab and have noticed various parts need replacing quite often. For instance, the sensors on our waste buckets seem to degrade every 4 months or so. Also, now that it's been a year many other parts are going, including the syringes, the pumps, the syringe cap, etc. Is anyone else experiencing trouble with the Echo hardware?