You might think to yourself “What’s wrong with bleach anyway?”  Bleach is pretty nice to kill things such as microbial organisms and such, and it is very cheap. But it doesn’t clean anything. So whenever it is asked to run 10% bleach at the end of an experiment, the only thing that is getting done is the killing of whatever is inside and around the sample probe. If we want to actually clean the probe, we’ll need to run a detergent like contrad for a few more minutes. We wanted to find a solution that would allow us to do both in one step, which is why we’re going with Cavicon!

So what is Cavicon? We made up the name, it’s not a product available on the market. It’s a mix of 90% Cavicide and 10% Contrad. Cavicide is a surface disinfectant heavily used in medical settings to sanitize equipments and tools. It essentially duplicates the job done by bleach. We were introduced to it by the Bigfoot service engineers and have been using it on the sorters for a while now with very good success. Having it mixed with contrad now allows us to get rid of contaminants and dissolve any protein built-up in the sample line in one step.

So whenever you used bleach on any of our instruments, you’ll now use CaviCon. And you won’t fear getting those annoying bleach spots on your clothes ever again. It’s a win!

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