What freezer for a starting DIYBio lab?

[Jiri Dluhos]

Hi colleagues and co-hackers,

I'm currently looking for a freezer for our budding lab and have problems choosing... there seems to be two groups of freezers available:

1) Kitchen freezers. Suspiciously cheap, often with incomplete specifications (even from the producer). Sometimes have some strange "features" like automatic defreezing (who in their right mind would use that?)

2) So-called laboratory freezers. Roughly four times as expensive as the top-notch kitchen freezers.

Now I hesitate. What should I get? (I tried to scavenge local professional labs for old devices, but so far they have no units to spare.)

What is your experience in this field? Would a reasonable kitchen freezer be sufficient? (Let's say http://www.liebherr.com/HG/en-GB/region-UK/products_hg.wfw/id-650058-0_35437-0 ).

Thanks everyone in advance,

    Jiri Dluhos

[Mega]

Hi!

If you take a kitchen freezer, you should put your sensitive enzymes into something with a high thermal mass.... 

Like that: Fill some water into a marmelade jar, a few fingers high. freeze it overnight (or a few hours). 

Then you have something to store the enzymes and plasmids in. Close the cap. So if it heats, the enzymes inside will stay relatively cold. 

[Cathal Garvey]

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Kitchen freezer without auto-defrosting would be perfect, although
Mega's advice is good: stuff the freezer with "thermal mass"
(ice-cooler-packs) so its temperature stays fairly constant despite
opening/closing/powercuts/defrosting-cycles-you-didn't-want.

"Industrial" equipment and "lab" equipment is sometimes valuable, and
sometimes just a ripoff designed to scare beaurocrats who don't
understand what they're paying for; when asked to buy a freezer for a
lab by a PI, a bureaucrat is going to assume that a "lab" freezer has
some magic special sauce a normal freezer doesn't. I have yet to learn
of a magic freezer.

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[Avery louie]

To be safe, look for non-defrosting.  Little mini-fridges are cheap and plentiful, and a good first fridge.

--A

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2013 at 08:30:48PM +0100, Cathal Garvey wrote:
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> Hash: SHA256
>
> Kitchen freezer without auto-defrosting would be perfect, although
> Mega's advice is good: stuff the freezer with "thermal mass"
> (ice-cooler-packs) so its temperature stays fairly constant despite
> opening/closing/powercuts/defrosting-cycles-you-didn't-want.
>
> "Industrial" equipment and "lab" equipment is sometimes valuable, and
> sometimes just a ripoff designed to scare beaurocrats who don't
> understand what they're paying for; when asked to buy a freezer for a
> lab by a PI, a bureaucrat is going to assume that a "lab" freezer has
> some magic special sauce a normal freezer doesn't. I have yet to learn
> of a magic freezer.

There's one major difference between consumer and lab refrigerators:
latter are explosion-proof (sparkless). If you ever had a fridge full of ether
vapor blow up on you, that's a very useful feature.

[Cathal Garvey]

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As in, "Lab" freezers are less likely to *trigger* an explosion, or
are more likely to *survive* or even *contain* one?

In any case, I stand corrected then; some lab freezers may have useful
features domestic ones don't. It would seem though that this feature
is of little relevance to DIYbio, where ether and other highly
volatile explosives are less commonly in use (with the noteworthy
exception of chloroform..).

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[Brian Degger]

Have recently seen a down to -45C freezer for £1200. think the difference between this and -80 is that the -80C fridge has an additional freezer compressor. is -45 worth it?

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[Cathal Garvey]

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Well, on account of Newton's law of cooling, I would expect the 35C
difference to translate to a drastic saving in running costs, and
1,200 isn't bad for a low-temp fridge! I suspect -45 is below the
Ice-I/II thresholds (which would make it pretty useful for long-term
storage), but maybe Wikipedia is the place to ask about temperature
thresholds for Ice types.

On 04/02/2013 02:05 PM, Brian Degger wrote:
> Have recently seen a down to -45C freezer for �1200. think the
> difference between this and -80 is that the -80C fridge has an
> additional freezer compressor. is -45 worth it?
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Cathal Garvey
> <cathal...@cathalgarvey.me

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[Nathan McCorkle]

Eugen, speaking from experience??? That sounds horrible no matter who it happened to.

Do you think the change includes a brushless motor and solid-state relays? Or more than that (to make it spark-free)?

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[Simon Quellen Field]

I can imagine only a couple places where a spark might happen in a residential freezer.

There is a switch that turns the light on, and that can be fixed by removing the light bulb.

Then there is the thermostat, which in old freezers used to be a bimetallic strip that closed the circuit when the temperature got too high.

But those were usually enclosed to prevent frost from gumming them up, and new ones are usually solid state.

The compressor and motor are outside of the freezer box itself.

And why would you have an open container of ether in a freezer?

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[Nathan McCorkle]

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote: 

And why would you have an open container of ether in a freezer?

Only thing that immediately comes to my mind is during recrystallisation.

 

-Nathan

[Simon Quellen Field]

Open containers of ether in unvented enclosed spaces are a bad idea.

Freeze a bunch of blue ice bags and put them in an open cooler with your ether under a fume hood.

Or use some less volatile solvent.

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[Nathan McCorkle]

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote:

Open containers of ether in unvented enclosed spaces are a bad idea.

Freeze a bunch of blue ice bags and put them in an open cooler with your ether under a fume hood.

Or use some less volatile solvent.

Yeah in chem lab courses we would just have a crushed ice bath in the hood.

--
-Nathan

[Cathal Garvey (Phone)]

It's not as if Ether even *needs* an ignition source, after all...

Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote:

Open containers of ether in unvented enclosed spaces are a bad idea.

Freeze a bunch of blue ice bags and put them in an open cooler with your ether under a fume hood.

Or use some less volatile solvent.

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On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Nathan McCorkle <nmz...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote: 

And why would you have an open container of ether in a freezer?

Only thing that immediately comes to my mind is during recrystallisation.

 

-Nathan

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[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 01:19:25PM -0700, Nathan McCorkle wrote:
> Eugen, speaking from experience??? That sounds horrible no matter who it
> happened to.

Not from personal experience, but it's a classic.

> Do you think the change includes a brushless motor and solid-state relays?

Interesting; apparently at least some brands are also externally
sparkless http://www.thermoscientific.com/ecomm/servlet/productscatalog_11152__87221_-1_4

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 02:26:58PM -0700, Simon Quellen Field wrote:

> And why would you have an open container of ether in a freezer?

There are dedicated ether rooms and storing products in solvents
is a standard procedure in chemistry.

There's a world outside of biology. The boundaries are not
really sharp.

[Simon Quellen Field]

As a chemist, I am aware of the need to store products in solvents.

The question was why would one leave the container open in the freezer.

:-)

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