Follow Me on Twitter
Jobs 4 Labs

Laboratory Water Baths

Laboratory Water Baths


LABORATORY WATER BATHS

Laboratory Water baths are fairly ubiquitous pieces of laboratory equipment and used in many types of laboratory. Clinical laboratories, research laboratories, industrial laboratories, government labs, veterinary labs and many more.

Water baths have been around for many years and were an obvious form of heat maintenance due to water's thermal stability in volume. Any regime that requires heating can in theory be applied to a water bath but some are clearly not practical due to the very nature of sample or reagent container. However thousands of labs use laboratory water baths for simple thawing of samples, incubation of microbiological tubes (for identification of bacteria for example) or for circulating fluids at temperature in larger bottles such as cell culture media.

There are five standard types of water bath. The simple straight forward laboratory water baths, shaking (orbital, reciprocating, elliptical or linear) water baths, circulating water baths, ultrasonic water baths and waterless (ecologically friendly) bead baths. All invariably with simple analog or digital temperature control and all will have alarms and accessories for holding samples, depending on the model and price. There are many variations of shape and size to these water baths but they tend to be bench top equipment and are therefore restricted to suitable bench sizes. The elements that come into contact with water are generally made of high grade stainless steel, for obvious reasons, but plastics and other non metallic elements have been used in lab water baths.

Ultrasonic cleaning baths are different in that they transform low frequency current into high frequency sound waves. High intensity ultrasound when applied to a fluid causes cavitation and the formation and destruction of minute bubbles in the fluid. These water baths are used to remove dirt from many types of product including lab equipment and components, especially those that may not be easy to clean by standard methods. Jewellry is also commonly cleaned this way. The water bath itself can have various commercial cleaning solutions added to increase the cleaning action.

Bead baths make use of recycled plastics and the thermal conductivity properties of these materials to reduce power output. Quoting Labarmor.com: "Water constantly evaporates during water bath operation. As water evaporates it cools. Due to this evaporative-cooling effect, the bath must heat more frequently, which increases energy consumption. A bead bath uses over 4X less energy when set to 65 ºC and over 2X less energy at 37 ºC. Plus, a bead bath provides more constant temperature and fewer temperature fluxuations during operation than a water bath."

There are many makes and models of water bath and we would recommend asking advice from your preferred supplies or just logging into Labquote to request prices and information from many suppliers in one go. The following are a list of common/well known makes/brands.

  1. Grant Water Baths
  2. Stuart Scientific Water Baths
  3. Shellab Water Baths
  4. Julabo Water Baths
  5. Thermolab Water Baths
  6. Labnet Water Baths
  7. Labarmor
SEE YOUR OFFER ON WATER BATHS FEATURED BELOW