We’re currently experiencing unprecedented levels of work owing to wider issues in the industry; namely several labs losing UKAS accreditation in their organics departments.
This unexpected influx of work is impacting our usually reliable service delivery. We’re working very hard to try and get ahead of work, but the reality is that currently we’re not able to reliably hit our usual 5-day turnaround.
As such we have taken the difficult decision to temporarily increase our standard turnaround to 7-days to better manage customer expectations.
Service delivery moving forward
We have acquired several new pieces of instrumentation which will allow us to increase our capacity and deliver a high standard of on time delivery. The process associated with accrediting new pieces of equipment, or methods, takes several months. This is a combination of procuring the equipment, validating upon arrival, and then consulting with our accrediting body (UKAS). In the interim, we can offer the use of these instruments on an unaccredited basis in order to speed up the delivery of work.
The instruments/methods are:
- PAHs: we have implemented a new GCMS to mirror those currently in use. It runs the identical methodology under the same conditions with no changes to levels of detection
- BTEX: we have an equivalent instrument and use the same methodology and operational criteria so no changes to detection limits will be seen
- Anions/Colorimetric Determinations including Chloride, Fluoride, Sulphate, TON, Nitrate, Nitrite, Ammoniacal Nitrogen, Hexavalent Chromium and Alkalinity: we have implemented a new automated technology which will combine several pre-existing colorimetric and Ion Chromatography methods. This type of discrete analyser is common within industry and represents an increase in capacity and improvement in most detection limits (see below)
| Analyte | Existing LoD | New LoD |
| Chloride | 0.5 mg/l | 0.4 mg/l |
| Fluoride | 0.1 mg/l | 0.07 mg/l |
| Sulphate | 1.7 mg/l | 0.3 mg/l |
| TON | 0.2 mg/l | 0.2 mg/l |
| Nitrate | 0.1 mg/l | 0.2 mg/l |
| Nitrite | 0.1 mg/l | 0.5 mg/l |
| Ammoniacal Nitrogen | 12 ug/l | 0.03 mg/l |
| Hexavalent Chromium | 10 ug/l | 1.5 ug/l |
| Alkalinity | 2 mg/l | 1 mg/l |
In all methods we continue to operate under the wider accreditation of our ISO 17025 Quality management System. We will run all samples using the same quality assurance and quality control processes as we do for the accredited methods, and in the case of the PAH/BTEX running an identical methodology to that covered in our scope of accreditation.
If you would like to discuss the opportunity of switching to unaccredited testing to maintain 5-day turnaround, please get in touch.
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