Chromatography Forum

Does anyone have an estimate of the cost of maintenance for Agilent Mass Specs (TOFs) if one were to do it themselves rather than pay for the service contract?

Cost would include :

Parts - PM kit parts
Parts - estimate of replacement parts over 5 years / 5
Man hours for annual PM and repairs.

Just looking to compare #s for approximately half a dozen instruments.

If anyone actually does this currently I would love to hear from you andf pick your brain.

Years ago the company I worked for did that calcuation for the instruments we had at the time. We were probably spending more by having service covered by contract, but the more important aspect was that contract customers were at the head of the line for dervice when there was a shortage of engineers to make the calls. Getting the instrument back up a day or two sooner may save costs in delays in project completion or getting product out the door. Thus, we maintained the contract. Even so, we did the "easy" repairs ourselves -- a part could arrive by 9 am and we'd have it in the instrument and up and running before it would have been possible for an engineer to drive from the office to our site. (We were about 2 or three hours away from the office by car.) But, when we had a mass spec show a fault that could not be pinned directly to a particuar card -- they showed up and got it fixed.

So, include the cost of down-time in cost justification calculations and get the expected difference in response times between covered and not covered repairs.

Don,
Thanks for the reply. Great points. Actually response time would play a major part of the "price" since having in-house service engineers would essentially make downtime of instruments minimal. That is currently our practice for HPLCs which are in-house at this time.

The hardest part I am finding to price out is estimated parts, since as long as everything is running smooth, the only parts you have to have on hand is PM parts, and consumables.
The real issue is trying to estimate how often large hardware falures occur such as turbos, control boards, acquisition boards, rough pumps etc.
With only a few MS systems it is probably cost effective to get the service contract but once you have a large number of these systems it becomes a lot more financially viable to consider an alternative. The problem is, what is that magical breakpoint # of instruments when in-house service becomes cost effective.

I can't say what the cost would be on TOFs, but with 25 Agilent GC/MS systems in our lab it is significantly cheaper to have one in house service engineer than to have service contracts on all of our instruments. We have mostly diff pump MS, but do have a few turbos, that are 4-5 years old with no pump failures. Board failures are uncommon, maybe 3-4 a year. Our biggest non-consumable repair expense is replacing those junk Pfeifer rough pumps on the newer 5975 MS. We are not exactly easy on our systems either with each one running 200-350 production samples a day (avg 20hrs run time per day per instrument) six days a week.

Our biggest non-consumable repair expense is replacing those junk Pfeifer rough pumps on the newer 5975 MS.

May I chime in on this: these pumps are junk, sure do not last very long !!!

Our biggest non-consumable repair expense is replacing those junk Pfeifer rough pumps on the newer 5975 MS.

May I chime in on this: these pumps are junk, sure do not last very long !!!

I hope people from Agilent and Pfeifer will read this post.

Do you find the rough pumps fail due to not enough oil changes ?
I know some of our Edwards rough pumps have failed probably the fact being that the oil is only changed annualy when the Service engineer comes in. Ideally I am leaning towards implementing an oil change every 6 months to extend the life of these pumps. Generally the Edwards pumps are pretty reliable and solid.

Another problem I am finding is actually getting pricing on the replacement parts. Agilent field service reports do not include prices of parts replaced.
I know Applied Biosystems generally include prices of parts replaced.
Is there a site out there with posted prices of Agilent replacement parts for TOFs etc?

Do you find the rough pumps fail due to not enough oil changes ?
I know some of our Edwards rough pumps have failed probably the fact being that the oil is only changed annualy when the Service engineer comes in. Ideally I am leaning towards implementing an oil change every 6 months to extend the life of these pumps. Generally the Edwards pumps are pretty reliable and solid.

Another problem I am finding is actually getting pricing on the replacement parts. Agilent field service reports do not include prices of parts replaced.
I know Applied Biosystems generally include prices of parts replaced.
Is there a site out there with posted prices of Agilent replacement parts for TOFs etc?

The oil change interval does not seem to have any effect on the rate of failure. The pump itself is a bad design, and I personally feel they are undersized for the job at hand.

Our biggest non-consumable repair expense is replacing those junk Pfeifer rough pumps on the newer 5975 MS.

May I chime in on this: these pumps are junk, sure do not last very long !!!

I hope people from Agilent and Pfeifer will read this post.

I have been fighting with Agilent over this issue for going on two years now. They admit there is a problem, but seem completely unwilling to make it right.