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Money Saving Tips
With the
ever increasing cost of supplies and reduced reembursement from insurance carriers, reducing waste is good practice.
If you already utilize these tips, great! If you have a tip which will reduce waste, save money and help the environment,
drop me a line and I will add them to this list. Thank you!
Save Money on
Printer Ink - Most printers are set to print at Normal or Best Quality and use a tremendous amount of ink. Actually,
ink is the most expensive thing about a printer! For most applications, using the draft quality setting will produce a very
acceptable quality printed page and will use far less ink. So, set the default to the lowest quality. In Windows, Click Start>>Printers
and Faxes. Right-click your printer and select Printing Preferences. Select the Paper/Quality tab. Under Quality Settings,
click Draft. Under Color, click Black & White. No sense in burning through your color ink unnecessarily either. Now, when
you print your will use far less ink and only black ink unless you choose to print in color. To print a higher quality page
with color, when you click print, choose 'printer preferences' and change the quality setting to 'Normal'
and the color setting to 'color'. This will change the setting for this print job only.
Save money
on Cryo Embedding Media - Whether you use O.C.T. or T.F.M. or some other brand of embedding media, it is frustrating
when the bottle gets more than half empty waithing for the medium to run to the tip. Many people keep the bottle up side down
to avoid this. Sometimes people just throw out the bottle when it gets low and open a new bottle. Is is useful and saves a
lot of money over time, to take the bottles which are nearly empty and turn them upside down in a partialy full bottle and
squeeze out the last into the new bottle. Over time this can save hundreds of dollars.
Save money
on Cryo-Spray - No matter what brand of cryo-spray you use, you can go through a lot of cryo spray in a weeks time.
Many people spray quite hard to cool the specimen or chuck or whatever they are cooling. This does two things: First it sprays
a lot of frost on whatever is being cooled. Second it wastes probably over half of the coolant being sprayed out. Try using
a lighter spray or just drizzle the spray on the object you are cooling. You will get the desired effect utilizing far less
spray coolant. Remember, everything you see dripping off the specimen you are cooling is wasted coolant. NOTE: spraying more
lightly also minimized the danger of blowing tissue debris up into your face!
Save Money on Gauze and swabs -
It is easy to go through a lot of gauze in a day in the Mohs lab. I have noticed that when cleaning up surgical instruments
many times people throw away the unused gauze and swabs from the surgical packs. This unused gauze and swabs can be recycled
to the Mohs lab for use, saving a considerable amount of money over a years time.
Save your Anti-Roll
plate from abuse - as you know anti-roll plates are expensive to replace, the glass often costing $100 or more. What
you may not know is that most of the chips caused on the edge of the glass plate are caused by using a brush to clean debris
off the plate. When a brush is used, especially as a low angle, often the ferrule (metal part that holds the bristles in place)
hits the glass and chips it. If you develop the habit of always using gauze to chean off the anti-roll plate, it will last
for a much longer time.
Also, especially with Leica cryostats - the yoke which holds the glass is made of aluminum.
The fingers of the yoke rest directly on the knife blade which is made of hardened steel. Repeatedly roughly slamming the
anti-roll plate down on the knife will eventually and sometimes quite quickly damage and gouge the surface of the aluminum
fingers. When this happens, the gap the section slides into to stay flat is diminished and the anti-roll plate becomes difficult
to adjust making sectioning more difficult. So set the anti-roll plate down gently and the yoke will last much longer.
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