Water CRISIS!!

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone...

Water is sometimes called the elixir of life, however for scientists water is the most important reagent in the lab. Most of your reagents are made up in water and alot of your experiments are even carried out in water. Water is our liquid gold.

However, water isn't just water. No! No! No! That stuff that comes out of your tap... well shock horror, it's not pure water and therefore not good enough for our experimental use. In the lab, there are three grades of water.

1. Normal tap water - good to wash your hands in... and maybe wash up some equipment... that's about it
2. RO/de-ionized water - good for growing bacteria and running gels
3. Milli-Q - Pure "2 hydrogens to every oxygen" water

Milli-Q water is very important to me, a lot of my experiments require me to perfuse liquids across the surfaces of cells. These solutions are generally differing concentrations of certain activators in 'physiological saline' which I make up out of Milli-Q water... no Milli-Q water... No EXPERIMENTS!! *baum baum*

Now, the system in the maze turns Sydney Tap Water into Ro water which is then feed into the Milli-Q filtering systems to become Milli-Q water. The cartridges that filter water to Milli-Q standard require the water coming in to be relatively pure or they clog up quite easily... and unfortunately for us, seems that the system filter tap water to RO water wasn't doing its job, therefore our Milli-Q water has been crap as the filters are too clogged up... fun fun fun...

Luckily for us... it has been fixed at least temporarily. The system is so old it need to be replaced entirely... and who know when that'll happen!

Though it does mean I have no more excuses for not doing my work... DARN!