Chromatography Forum

We had the water management kit installed last Oct. We did not clean the source prior to the install. Everything is still working fine.
The FlBZ response is 90-95% of the last caliration, and the surrogates are in the low 80's.
I'm sort of lost. Don't know what to monitor to determine when to clean the source.
Anyone know if Agilent is working on a " care and feeding" application for the kit?

How often do you tune or calibrate? In my experience using this set up, there are a couple different places to monitor, but you need some sort of way to track them with data points (tune or calibration).

Since we are not a production lab, we've had to find other ways of gauging instrument performance. The most telling is usually the back end of your calibration. It will get more and more quadratic the dirtier the source gets (%RSDs of 25+ when things get really hairy). You can also monitor BFB fragmentation/ion ratios, which doesn't take a new calibration if you use BFB as a surrogate, just picking through data to see where things start to break.

We only calibrate when our CCS's fail. Lately we can use a calibration for 2+ months. We retune prior to calibrating.
BFB is one of our surrogates and we do the bfb evaluation every 12 hrs when running.
Our latest calibration run 2/14/13 all RSDs are < 10 with the exception of 2,2-DCP which is 10.01%. 40% of calibrated compounds have RSDs og <5%.
The only qustionable thing I see in the last data run is in the BFB evaluation, 50/95 ratio is 15.3% ( range 15-40).

Can you please tell me what is Agilents “water” Kit? Is it by chance Agilents VOC Kit p/n G7022A?

Sounds correct. It's the one with a new DB 624 UI column, 1mm liner and 6mm drawout lens for the MS.

Bigbear,

I was told, long, long ago, that 502 in a standard spectra autotune was the key indicator. It works very well for me. If you can't bust 1% for 502, it means your source is dirty. As a result, with customers I work with, I save all the standard spectra autotunes to measure source health.

Best regards,

AICMM

AICMM,

Can you please explain furhter what you mean by "If you can't bust 1% for 502, it means your source is dirty."?

Thanks!