Centrifuge: a small line that belongs in a laboratory package

What you are actually buying

A bench centrifuge is bought by configuration, not by name. What determines whether it fits the laboratory is the relative centrifugal force it reaches with the rotor actually supplied, the tube sizes and positions per run, whether the rotor is fixed-angle or swing-out, and whether refrigeration is needed for the assays and blood products involved. Rotors, buckets and tube adapters are commonly quoted as extras, so the working machine costs more than the figure on the first page. The recurring mistake is specifying speed in revolutions per minute. The force a sample experiences depends on rotor radius, so two machines at the same stated speed are not equivalent, and a protocol written in g cannot be verified from an RPM figure.

Why centrifuge suits collective purchasing

Honest answer: on its own this is a weak pool. The ticket is small, so even the best price on a single bench unit moves nobody's budget, and delivering a low-value item to scattered addresses eats the benefit. It works when it travels with the rest of the laboratory, alongside analysers, incubators, microscopes, refrigerators and autoclaves, as one departmental award, which is where a supplier will sharpen accessories and service terms. Specification agreement is the easy part here. The reason to pool is order size and a single service contract covering the whole laboratory, not the unit price of the centrifuge.

How a pool for this runs

Also pooled under Laboratory & pathology