GC/MS

[ramosjos321]

Hi all:

This is my first time posting something on this forum. I work with electronic noses (e-noses) and lately my partners and I have thought of purchasing a GC/MS unit since we need it to validate our results. Does anyone know if I can purchase all the equipment necessary to do GC/MS analysis for under $5,000? Please excuse my ignorance if the price is ridiculously low but I know nothing about GC/MS. Nevertheless I have seen some units within that range on ebay.
We are looking to buy a complete unit with all the bells and whistles to do GC/MS. Of course, we need it to be functional. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.

Jose

[Rndirk]

Welcome to the forum.

For a new or refurbished GC-MS (single quadrupole) from an instrument manufacturer (first-hand sale) you're looking at ~20-60K price range. Prices vary a lot with different configurations, and how much discount you can get.

I can't comment on the price / quality you can expect from ebay (or similar source) sales, but with a 5K budget I believe that's the place to be.

[ramosjos321]

Hi:

Thanks for your reply. Yes I figured that these things are very expensive.
There are some Chinese brands that are probably within my range. We don't
need it for sophisticated analyses, but just to validate results on an
electronic nose.

Jose

[benhutcherson]

An older system like an HP 5890/5971 is probably doable for your price. This is a sentimental favorite of mine-I learned GC-MS on one, run my own business servicing a few, and also "resurrected" one at my day job not too long ago that's now is more or less daily service.

Some of the older Varian ion trap instruments(Saturn 2000, 2100, 2200) have also come down a fair bit in price the last several years. These are good, sturdy instruments and in my experience were quite popular in their day. With that said, support is a bit spotty on them(I can email our local Agilent field service engineer a question about a 5971 and even though she'll give me a tough time for having one, she'll still answer it-Varian becomes a question of emailing Agilent and hoping you find someone who knows, or alternatively asking Bruker or Scion) and parts availability is a bit of a problem. Ion traps are in some ways simpler to maintain than quadrupoles like the Agilent instruments. With that said, admittedly I'm biased, but I'd still rather service an Agilent/HP instrument than a Varian. There's a reason why the 20 year old Saturn I have at work mostly serves as a teaching prop and hasn't been under vacuum in a few years, while the 30 year old HP gets daily use. I don't have a ton of ion trap experience, but one other potential concern is that most library mass spectra were generated on a quadrupole, and ion trap spectra don't look quite the same-if you're doing spectral interpretation this isn't a huge deal as the major peaks are still there, but can cause issues with library searches.

All of that aside, any time someone asks me about buying their own GC-MS, I always respond that just buying the instrument in the first place is only a small part of the cost. For one thing, GC-MSs don't respond well to being turned on and off. The two I look after that are in active use are under vacuum all the time unless I'm doing maintenance, something which USUALLY last less than a day. Even if I've just had one open for a few minutes, the newer instruments usually take a few hours to settle down, while the older ones(5971) can take a few days-I try to schedule my 5971 service on Fridays so that it's reasonably close to ready on Monday. When I first pumped it down after being open for 10 years, it was probably 2 weeks before it really was stable. Leaving them under vacuum means that they get some flow of carrier gas all the time, and the 5890/5971 eats it up even using the EPC "gas saver" mode(most 5890s I see don't have an EPC). Helium remains the most common carrier gas, but it's getting really pricey and sometimes availability is spotty depending on where you are in the world. Remember too that you really should be using high purity helium, which runs a fair bit more than what I pejoratively call "balloon grade." I switch mine over to nitrogen when they're not in use, but nitrogen is not a suitable carrier gas for GC-MS. Hydrogen is gaining in popularity, and I run some of my GCs(not GC-MSs) on it-it actually has quite a few benefits in terms of both resolution and analysis speed, and is considerably less expensive than helium, but is not problem free. It's actually quite difficult to get a hydrogen explosion, but the possibility is there and older instruments might not be as well equipped to deal with one as newer instruments. It's also not suitable for all analytes, as it's not totally inert.

[Consumer Products Guy]

An older system like an HP 5890/5971 is .... a sentimental favorite of mine-I learned GC-MS on one, run my own business servicing a few, and also "resurrected" one at my day job not too long ago that's now is more or less daily service.

Not only did I learn GCMS from the HP tutorial, I also had to learn what a "mouse" was. I had pushed for GCMS in the 5970 era, but there was no funding. The 5971 ran on Windows 286 or 386, had MS-DOS Executive or similar before File Manager.

[James_Ball]

An older system like an HP 5890/5971 is .... a sentimental favorite of mine-I learned GC-MS on one, run my own business servicing a few, and also "resurrected" one at my day job not too long ago that's now is more or less daily service.

Not only did I learn GCMS from the HP tutorial, I also had to learn what a "mouse" was. I had pushed for GCMS in the 5970 era, but there was no funding. The 5971 ran on Windows 286 or 386, had MS-DOS Executive or similar before File Manager.

I learned on a 5970 that was connected to the HP-RTE-A mini computer, command line based Chemstation. The company had received its first 5971 with Windows 3.1 a week before I arrived. After six months they had it installed and when I went to night shift I spent most of my nights running through the tutorials learning the system since nobody else in the lab wanted to learn Windows That was in the volatiles department, over in semivolatiles they had two old HP5995 instruments, basically a 5970 stood on end and married to the GC itself with a huge oil diffusion pump that backstreamed every time the power failed, which it did a lot back then.

[benhutcherson]

An older system like an HP 5890/5971 is .... a sentimental favorite of mine-I learned GC-MS on one, run my own business servicing a few, and also "resurrected" one at my day job not too long ago that's now is more or less daily service.

Not only did I learn GCMS from the HP tutorial, I also had to learn what a "mouse" was. I had pushed for GCMS in the 5970 era, but there was no funding. The 5971 ran on Windows 286 or 386, had MS-DOS Executive or similar before File Manager.

I learned on a 5970 that was connected to the HP-RTE-A mini computer, command line based Chemstation. The company had received its first 5971 with Windows 3.1 a week before I arrived. After six months they had it installed and when I went to night shift I spent most of my nights running through the tutorials learning the system since nobody else in the lab wanted to learn Windows That was in the volatiles department, over in semivolatiles they had two old HP5995 instruments, basically a 5970 stood on end and married to the GC itself with a huge oil diffusion pump that backstreamed every time the power failed, which it did a lot back then.

So now you tell me why Brenda would probably throw something at me if I mentioned buying one of those and getting it going

I was reading some old ads not too long ago for a different HP model MS-it was somewhat older than the 5995, but described(as best as I understood it) the analyzer basically being inside the diffusion pump stack. They touted simplicity and ease of maintenance, but I thought it sounded like a lot of problems waiting to happen.

Speaking of really old instruments-when I started at my undergrad college we had a Finnigan 1015 stuck over in the basement of the library. It had never been operational there-it came from state Environmental Protection and was acquired at a surplus auction by our analytical professor(who I still talk to regularly, but has always been a bit of a packrat). I would have loved to get it running, but I don't think there was any chance-we did have the computer that went with it(or I should say the two 19" full height racks) but were missing a lot of the other bits and pieces that tied the two together. There were also some other prizes over there too-I remember a couple of 80s benchtop Finnigan ion traps and the Varian GCs to go with them, plus a few other Varian GCs with ECDs(dead) and NPDs.

We had a few nicer instruments in our building-namely a Finnigan TSQ-700 and a couple of Sciex Triple Quads(the latter had cryopumps-the only example of those I've seen). I kind of wanted to get the TSQ up and going, but the same professor steered me instead toward a PE-Sciex ICP MS-I never got anywhere with that, and still think the TSQ would have been a lot more interesting to me at least . In any case, somewhere or another along the way, LSU's food science department wanted to set up an MS facility, and they hired an ex-Finnigan FSE to set it up. They bought the TSQ and the Sciex instruments from us, and while they were there to move them we offered him a "fire sale" price on the Finnigan ion traps(maybe $50 each or so-basically just a token amount). He got so excited over the 1015, and they had enough space in the truck, that we just gave it to him. I'd be curious to know if he ever got that one in particular going-apparently he knew of a way to run it on a modern computer. This was either late 2008 or early 2009 IIRC, or if not then within a year either way of there.

BTW, even though I've never used a TSQ, I have fond enough memories of that instrument that I'd dearly love to find one and get it going-of course my budget at work for nutty projects like that is basically non-existent(I might get a few hundred dollars if I could make a good argument for it adding capabilities we don't have, but that also comes with a few hundred extra dollars to have 220 service run to where it's set up) and I also don't have space for it.

[MSCHemist]

I purchased a refurb 6890-7673als and 5973 network no sim/scan for $30k for the manufacturing plant about 6 years ago but it eventually got sent to me to run (not enough expertise to run and maintain it at the plant). I made it into my solvent method workhorse and do mainly HS and SPME scans on my fancier R&D instrument.