Conserving electricity

[MSCHemist]

I read an interesting article about lab energy conservation and was wondering what could be done to reduce energy consumption by GC's. My only idea so far is to keep the ovens at ambient when not in use. Any other suggestions. How about the inlet heaters?

[Steve Reimer]

A few years ago we looked at labwide energy use and what we could do to reduce our total energy use. Not unexpectedly, our largest energy consideration was heating/cooling air that was then sucked up the fume hoods. The amount that GCs use is small compared to the HVAC costs for the lab air. In the long run you are better off if you can eliminate sample prep steps done in a hood and then eliminate the hood. Health and Safety people are working the other way on hood use, so it's more of a rear guard action.

I run park methods with low helium flow and oven heaters turned off. I leave the inlets on to avoid leaking column nuts on my volatile instruments (they have VI inlets).

[James_Ball]

I have never liked standby methods with cold column ovens that much, but if you do a blank run to bake out the columns it might help versus leaving the oven at 150c like I do. Of course our instrument only set idle for a few hours per day at most, so not much power saving time there anyhow.

One thing we have used to help with the A/C loading is venting the ovens out of the building. Dryer vent hose works well, vented just like a household cloths dryer. This not only keeps the cycling ovens from heating the room, but getting the heat away from the cold air intake makes the cycle faster. In our new building we installed a powered vent system for this, running a small vent hood motor connected to duct work dropped behind the instruments which pulls the hot air out of the building and helping to flow more cold air into the oven during cool down. Agilent now makes neat looking metal vent boxes to connect the tubing to, when we first started doing this we just screwed some of the flat plastic connectors used on cloths dryers to the back of the instruments.

[Steve Reimer]

We have most of our ovens vented into the hood duct work. It helps a lot in summer, not that it gets hot here.
I have two 6890/5973s that sit idle for months at a time. When they are needed it takes more than just a blank to get them on line.