There’s a secondhand lab instrument in my living room. It was built to prepare water samples for testing, and I bought it on eBay in September for about $1,100 of my own money. It was listed as untested and sold for parts. The listing was honest. But, before it could do anything, I had to resolder a good share of its circuit boards and power supplies.
I’m teaching it to prepare samples for our test instead of the ones it was designed for. To explain why I’m spending evenings on that, I have to start with a lab in South Africa.
I run Orono Spectral Solutions, a four-person company in Hermon, Maine. We developed the patented ClearShot™ extractor technology that forms the basis of ASTM D7575, a completely solvent-free method that measures Total Oil & Grease (TOG) in water in 10 to 15 minutes /OSS/. To run the method, a technician pushes a small water sample through the disposable ClearShot extractor, dries it, and reads it on a Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer, a common analy…