Aria and the high voltage board...

Hello Diana,

We have had some issues with the Aria high voltage boards.  We had two go out in
a relatively short-time frame.	I was told by two different people at BD that
this board has one of the highest failure rates of any part on the Aria.

You must be very vigilant in making sure your sort chamber is completely dry
when you are starting up.  Our facility lets advanced users to perform
self-sorting after some extensive training.  We had self-sorts right before
both high voltage boards went bad.  If someone leaves a little moisture around
the plates you can get arching which can short the board, as I’m sure you
already know.  The newer style sort blocks with the ceramic backing seem to be
much better at preventing catastrophic arching than the older style sort
blocks.

The installation of your board may also be part of the problem.  The board has 4
screws, one at each of the corners.  The lower right hand screw next to the high
voltage sink will arch over to the sinks and short the board.  BD’s solution to
this problem was simply not to install the screw in the lower right hand
corner.  They’ve removed the screw from our older Aria and our newest Aria was
shipped without it.

Hopefully, this helped a little,

Geoff-

Geoffrey Lyon
Biotechnology Associate I
FACS Facility
Yale University School of Medicine
TAC Building Rm-S613
300 Cedar Street

Shipping Address:
1 Gilbert Street
TAC Building Rm-S617
New Haven, CT 06519

New Haven, CT 06520-8035
(203) 785-2541
(203) 785-7949

>Hello all,
>
>We purchased our FACSAria in July 2004 and overall have been happy
>with it; it gives higher purities of sorted populations than the
>MoFlo we have, but it takes more time to get it there.  However, my
>question has more to do with other people's experiences with their
>Arias and the high voltage boards.
>
>We have had two go out since we purchased it, and today, it appears
>that it has gone out again.  The outermost streams (both far left
>and far right) when I do a test sort cannot reach out nearly as far
>as I know we have had them do in the past, even with the plate
>voltage set to maximum and the stream adjustment bars slid as far
>out as possible.  I might be able to sort two populations, those
>closest to the waste stream, but the outermost ones are iffy,
>particularly the left one.  I am reluctant to sort today because of
>this.	I currently have a call in to BD and I am waiting for a
>callback to confirm my suspicions.
>
>The question is:  What is the track record of these boards?  Is the
>problem stemming from bad power, since we are located in Oklahoma
>and are subject to all kinds of severe weather, or is the problem
>more on the order of poor design/poor implementation?
>
>We did have a rather strong storm move through two nights ago, with
>high winds, hail, hard rain, and the obligatory possible spring
>tornado, but we had no indication that we had lost power that night;
>this stream problem manifested itself yesterday, and no system in
>this lab is on a UPS or other power regulator.  As stated before, we
>have a MoFlo, as well as an LSRII, a Caliber and a FACScan.  Any
>insight would be useful, as we are considering obtaining a UPS or
>line regulator if this appears to be the problem.
>
>Thanks for the time,
>
>Diana Hamilton, Ph.D.
>Flow Cytometry Core Facility
>Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
>Oklahoma City, OK