Consumer Products Guy wrote:
We didn't have service contracts with Agilent or 3rd party for our Agilent GCs, HPLCs, and 3 GCMS but did use Agilent for yearly cGMP qualification on most of those. I was better at troubleshooting and repair on these than the typical lab chemist, so that saved us a fortune over the years.
Also remember that an Agilent service engineer has to repair stuff as Agilent intends. I remember once riveting a GC exhaust fan blade back on, and once drilling a small hole on a broken nub on a GC main board and using a bread tie through that to hold that long on-off "button" in place (so we didn't have to unplug to turn the GC off).
I'm retired now; my most-recent pointy-haired boss loved service contracts, even got extended warranties on his vehicles (bought brand-new, of course), even though even Consumers Reports warns against those. But to cover all our stuff would be over $100K each year, and management nixed that.
We found Agilent GC, GCMS, and HPLC to be pretty reliable, and I could fix most stuff on those. But then pointy-haired boss started considering himself a cGMP expert, and wanted in writing from Agilent or 3rd party servicer what a user could do without wrecking the "validation". Pointy-haired boss got to the point that he felt that replacing a purge valve frit, an autosampler rotor seal, etc., would put us in cGMP/FDA hell !!