Homelab

I've never been an advocate of doing much chemistry at home and there are a variety of reasons that I don't, beyond the obvious danger of working with hazardous materials in an environment that may not have appropriate safety equipment available. I won't go into the reasons here and have generally learned to keep quiet whenever this comes up due to how many scientists (and particularly "would-be scientists") enjoy the romanticism of a wild-west research (chemopunk?) scenario. I can't say that I have never felt that feeling before, especially when it comes to doing a little analytical chemistry.

There would be a lot of opportunities if you had the right equipment and that equipment sitting in people's homes is exactly what I want to ask about. Do you know of anyone with old (or new!) instruments sitting in their homes? Do they run? Are they ever in use?

I've heard stories of people keeping older instruments in their garage after a company dissolves or when they leave a teaching job, since the instrument's owner wasn't actually the institution. I've actually been offered a couple of fringe instruments over the years but never thought that I had the room for them myself. I think that my wife would agree, particularly when we move! Maybe the most interesting story I was ever told was the two analytical chemists, one I had briefly worked with, had a functioning MALDI-TOF in their garage. The storyteller even claimed that they'd fired it up once or twice and verified that it worked, making their garage a temporary mass spec lab. Pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to deal with the upkeep, I'm sure.

Comment and tell me the stories you've heard or been a part of. I only have a low powered microscope at my house right now, but who knows, maybe I could work my way up to a spectrophotometer one day!