Hello! Welcome to New Life Scientific. My name is Steve. Today we want to talk about the BioTek ELx405 plate washer and stacker system. I thought this would make a nice video for someone that haven't seen a fully tricked out BioTek plate washer. The ELx405 is the non-touchscreen model. It has its pluses and minus. You've got to navigate a little different through the menus which we're going to go through in a little bit. This particular unit is equipped with a 96-well head plate washer. As I mentioned then, it has the BioStack with the tall stacks which can hold lots of plates. We've got five of them in there and we're not even close to the top.
Our offering will include a vacuum pump. Not everybody includes a vacuum pump. Sometimes we don't either. This one does. Another nice unit that this one has is the valve module which allows you to have four reagent vessels connected at one time. And you're able to program your protocols to select which reagent you want to use. Also we've seen many of these configured with one bottle rather than two. This one has been a retrofit. It came in with a one bottle and if you only use one bottle and this one has the the waste sensor, you can only use about half of this bottle before it's full. That's not much plate washing. With a larger bottle one you can even put some three and four gallon waste bottles on here. You can get a lot of water in it. The trouble with a three and four gallon is it gets hard to lift. That's a lot of water. Anyway everything's equipped with quick release tubing. Color coordinated so you know where everything connects on all the valves. You can't hook them up- if you're watching colors you can't hook up wrong.
So this is a very complete unit. One of the more complete units. It does happen to come with a manual as well as a manual for both the plate washer and the BioStack. When you get your BioStack whether you buy them from us or from anybody, there is some setup involved with it. You've got your mounting plate. There's a mounting plate that does not come with the ELx405. This is part of the kit and then there's a separate kit for what you're connecting to. The feet of the plate stacker stacks onto that. Lays into two holes on that mounting plate and the same with the washer. You do have to adjust your distance back and your plate.
There's software built into the system to help you align that. It's very easy to run. It is somewhat forgiving. That's a "Utility Menu", "Set Up", "More", "BioStack" those are your different buttons that are in that align. You can either configure it, align or verify it. Just make sure that it sees it sometimes when you first get them they are fussy. After you get one going they just never seem to fail after that. But the Align goes in, you tell it what you're trying to align such as your C position where you set your crane right here to the height that it needs to be. When I tell it to go, it drops down to certain points and when I exit, it's going to save that as a point or it's going to ask me to. I don't want to save it. This is set up pretty good. As I said, fairly simple menu. Not a lot of buttons but there's plenty of them to get along. The "Main Menu", "Previous Screen". If you get into an area you don't want to be in, just use the "Previous Screen". The "Main Menu" which is here. Let's just say we want to run and use one of our wash protocols and you can create your own protocols. This is one that is going to use plate well B. You've got some large naming conventions. Anyway that's the one we're going to use. We're going to just press "Enter". It tells us what to do. To start press "Start".
It lowers the plate out.
Drops it into place. As you can hear there, the vacuum pump clicks on. It goes ahead and brings it to priming. Gets ready for the wash.
You can hear it doing the aspiration.
You can set this up to do as many several cycles on the watch. I think you can do up to seven cycles. In addition to doing wash it also dispenses. You have similar options on that as well.
This is a little easier to watch. If I take the guard off -- I'm not advocating you to remove the guard in your lab.
Because it's a stacker it's been told to just keep going until that tray is empty. It goes grab the next one. How much work could you get done in a day not having to reload your plate washer?
There's a variety of different heads you can get for the unit.
Seem to be very reliable units. They have been around forever. They have been acquired by Agilent who has not really changed the design, some coloring as you could be aware.
So don't be afraid to buy a BioTek plate washer with the stacker. We're going to have this one listed (www.newlifescientific.com). We've got several of these. We almost always have the plate washer in stock. Let us know if you're interested. If you have any questions, contact us (cs@newlifescientific.com). Thank you very much! From Cridersville.
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