[3dem] your experiences with the Gatan Oneview?

[Morgan, David Gene]

Tobias,

We had a nasty and unusual problem with our OneView that caused us to put the camera back under service contract for a year or two while evaluating whether the issue had been resolved or not.  It is still under contract, but I'm not sure that we will renew it.

The issue was that our chilled water system for the instrument developed a nasty cyanobacterial infection that we have simply been unable to eliminate.  We have been able to knock it down with periodic treatments of things like hydrogen peroxide (the best agent we have found), but a low level of infection always returns.  We think that the original contamination came from the OneView itself, but we couldn't prove that...

The only problem that we saw because of this was that the baffles in the water line of the OneView would clog with biofilm, causing the camera to overheat and shut down.  Fixing this (cleaning the baffles and returning water flow to normal) was a huge investment of facility time (multiple hours every time it occurred), and it happened frequently enough that in the end, it was worth paying the service contract so that Gatan had to deal with it (i.e., tear the camera apart and totally replace every piece of the water cooling system with new and hopefully sterile parts).

We also ended up putting the OneView on a separate chilled water line, using what is effectively a large air-chilled PC cooling system.  We have not seen any bacterial contamination in the separate system, and while the main chiller still has the original contamination, we have yet to see any adverse effects on the microscope.

I guess the point of the story is we saw a chronic problem that was bad enough to return the camera to a service contract.  It's unclear whether we would have saved money by simply paying Gatan to do the work they did and attaching the camera to the independent chiller.  That said, the service contract gave me enough peace of mind that it was worth the cost...

--
    politics is more difficult than physics.
                                             A. Einstein

            David Gene Morgan
        Electron Microscopy Center
             047E Simon Hall
             IU Bloomington
          812 856 1457 (office)
          812 856 3221 (3200)
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From: 3dem <3dem-bounces at ncmir.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Tobias Furstenhaupt <furstenh at mpi-cbg.de>
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Subject: [External] [3dem] your experiences with the Gatan Oneview?

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Dear colleagues

we have bought a new Gatan OneView that works fine and suits perfectly the scientific needs. But it will come out of warrenty soon and I am wondering if a service contract would be necessary.
Therefore I was wondering what the experiences 'in the field' are: Do you have a maintenance contract and what problems did you have so far?
Our worst problems so far were failing communications and this could be fixed by a simple restart of the controller...

cheers
Tobias




-----------------------------------
Tobias Fürstenhaupt, PhD
head of Electron Microscopy
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG)
Pfotenhauerstrasse 108
01307 Dresden, Germany

mail: furstenh at mpi-cbg.de
phone: (+49) (0)351 210-2690
cell: (+49) (0)176 / 44498706 (NEW!)
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