For those of you who do tube testing would anyone be willing to share their procedure on how you periodically change and decontaminate your saline reagent squirt bottles? I know it sounds simple but I can't find info on this right off. We fill our squirt bottles from the cell washers but don't really have a procedure on how often to change the saline and clean the bottles. Thanks in advance.

I just wash the bottle out with a bleach solution, rinse very well with distilled water, let them dry then fill with saline.

Same as babs.....we use 10% and try to do it about every other week. We always do it when the saline cube we are using expires (we have exp. on a piece of tape on the side of the bottles) and we open a new cube.

I always had a problem with using bleach in saline bottles, fearing that they would not be rinsed well enough. Currently, we rinse them monthly in DI, then let them dry overnight before refilling them. We change the salline daily.

A 70% ethyl alcohol rinse, followed by a good rinse in DI water is used to decontaminate the diluent pump used with gel testing. That could be an alternative to bleach.