deciphering message on Waters detector: please help

[hplctroubleshooting]

System: Waters 2487 Dual Absorbance Detector

I turn the machine on and it warms up fine until it finishes up calibration and then a message pops up, it reads "peak not found reference energy at maximum". Since then I've noticed that one of our analyte peaks has decreased in intensity (by almost half) i.e. it's not running as well on other peaks as well.

Could anyone please inform, technically speaking, on what this message is referring to? Would really appreciate it.

[tristanewalters]

I'm not sure from a technical standpoint exactly what it means, but we have seen the message before. How many lamp hours do you have on that lamp? It is probably time to replace it.

[HPLCaddict]

It sounds to me as if the detector performs some sort of wavelength calibration on startup and failed...

[AA]

This indicates a weak lamp or poor light transmittance through the optics (dirty flow cell, contaminated mobile phase, improperly placed cuvette). What the message means is that the detector can no longer increase the gain at the front end amplifier to bring the deuterium spectrum back up to an acceptable level.

[hplctroubleshooting]

This indicates a weak lamp or poor light transmittance through the optics (dirty flow cell, contaminated mobile phase, improperly placed cuvette). What the message means is that the detector can no longer increase the gain at the front end amplifier to bring the deuterium spectrum back up to an acceptable level.

thanks all, especially AA, for the help