10 Essential Maintenance Tips for Vacuum Aspirators

Vacuum Aspirator 

The vacuum aspirators are mainly helpful in sucking out unwanted liquid waste material from the fluid vessels in the laboratory. These are very helpful in separating two different liquids from each other and in extracting the RNA/DNA components from the cell culture. The vacuum aspirators majorly use vacuum pumps so that through the application of vacuum pressure, the liquid can easily be pulled out of the vessels, and the accuracy of the results can be easily achieved. 

Maintenance of Vacuum Aspirator: 

However, for the vacuum aspirator to work effectively and efficiently, it is necessary to maintain this laboratory apparatus in its proper form. Otherwise, the lack of maintenance can lead to the failure of the device and false positive results in terms of improper filtration and sucking of the laboratory vessels. Therefore, for proper maintenance, these are the few points the researcher should be aware of: 

1. The vacuum aspirator must be washed inside, especially the collection bottle, which must be cleaned after every usage. Every time liquid waste is collected inside the bottle, it must be adequately rinsed to avoid leaving over the remains of previous liquid material. 
2. The collection tube should be rinsed along with the bottle so that it won’t get green inside (sometimes, the continuous flow of the liquid causes algae growth inside, so it’s necessary to rinse the tube with water after every usage). 
3. The collection bottle and the tube must be cleaned with 70% isopropylidene solution or ethanol since microorganisms can grow inside the vacuum aspirator. 
4. You must check the power button every day before starting the aspiration process. 
5. Ensure that the vacuum pressure is working or not at the end of the week and at least every three days since it’s one of the main components that cause aspiration and suction of the unwanted liquids from the fluid vessels in the laboratory. 
6. Every weekend, it is necessary to check whether the fittings and capping are correctly fitted, or if it leaks inside out, then the capping must be changed so that no air can pass out of the vacuum aspirator equipment. 
7. Just make sure that the attached dual head brushless pump in the aspirator is working or not to create a proper level of vacuum pressure inside the bottle to suck unwanted liquid waste material. 
8. The fittings of the bottle on the aspirator holder and the tube with the cap must be adjusted so as not to lose air while suctioning the liquid waste. 
9. From time to time, the hand must be checked to work effectively during suctioning, not stopped in between the aspiration process in the biological laboratory.
10. Properly sterilize and disinfect the complete vacuum aspirator equipment so that no other contamination can occur inside the pump, collection bottle, and tubing. 

Vacuum Aspirator Benefits in Laboratory 

The vacuum aspirator is one of the most needed apparatuses in the laboratory, used to separate liquids from other laboratory fluids and to withdraw the supernatant fluids from vessels like beakers, conical flasks, Petri dishes, etc. These supernatant liquids can interfere with the results’ accuracy, so the sample must be pure and free of multiple sample fluids. In addition to that, the vacuum aspirator is mainly used to suck the utilized media by the eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells in the Petri dishes so that another medium could quickly pour into the same petri dish. The aspirator, i.e., the aspirator, comes in three forms: the Midi Ispirator, Mini Ispirator, Maxi Ispirator, etc. All of them are different from each other due to the various volumes of liquids they carry. 

Conclusion 

The maintenance of the vacuum aspirator is essential, like that of the slide dryer, since these are the most frequently used laboratory equipment. If not maintained promptly, then there are chances that the apparatus stop functioning efficiently. So thus, the researcher needs to check whether every component of the vacuum aspirator is appropriately working. After every three days or is weakened, he is required to check the operations of the aspirator so that the apparatus will not be stopped in the middle of the suctioning procedure. 

The maintenance of the vacuum aspirator must be addressed since this is the apparatus that helps researchers get final accurate results; otherwise, no liquid or even solids in the laboratory could ever be pure. With a vacuum aspirator, the filtering process of the liquids is more efficient and effort-consuming. Previously, the micropipettes were used in the laboratories manually to suction liquids. However, it required a lot more effort and time since they can only suck a small amount of the liquid out of the liquid container. However, vacuum suctioning effectively suctions large volumes of liquids at once.