How to Choose A Suitable Pipette?

Colleagues who sell pipettes often receive inquiries from recommended customers, "Can you give me a set of pipettes? They can be used in all measuring ranges, like a set of four." At the request of customers, pipettes with four measuring ranges of 0.5-10uL, 5-50uL, 10-100uL, and 100-1000uL are generally recommended to customers. On the surface, it seems that what the customer buys covers almost the full range of micropipetting, and it seems that everything is done perfectly, but this is not the case! After many years of pipette after-sales work, we have collected feedback from customers on problems such as inaccurate pipetting and difficulty in use, which often stem from the initial set selection.


Let's take the most common example: Customers often give the most feedback in pipetting when using a 10uL pipette to transfer liquids within 1uL. Theoretically speaking, a pipette with a measuring range of 0.5-10uL has no problem when operating liquids within 0.5-1uL. Why do customers often report the most problems at this measurement range? Below 1uL is an ultra-micro liquid operation. The amount of liquid is almost invisible to the naked eye. The basic skills of liquid operation are very high, such as: rinsing, insertion depth and other technical details.For example: technical details such as rinsing, insertion liquid level depth, etc. In addition, the quality of the suction head also has a great impact on this micro-volume operation. Some suction tips of poor quality will have residual plastic burrs on the tip end of the suction head. Such poor quality tips have almost fatal effects on micropipetting. When using tips of normal quality, most operators choose to use pipettes with a range of 0.1-2uL. For liquid transfer operations below 1uL, the pipetting effect is significantly better than pipettes with a range of 0.5-10uL.

Below we take the Yanbio pipette as an example to illustrate:
The general range of ordinary precision adjustable pipettes is between 0.1uL and 10mL. The different ranges are shown in the table below:

Different models of pipettes have different ranges. When we choose a pipette, a certain range will often appear, and several pipettes of different models can suffice. How to choose the pipette with the most suitable volume.

Example: A pipette is required, and the volume often pipetted is 20uL. We have four different types of 2-20uL (model YB-P20) / 5-50uL (model YB-P50) / 10-100uL (model YB-P100) / 20-200uL (model YB-P200) Liquid dispensers are available. Which pipette has the smallest error at 20uL?

According to our daily routine of selecting products, we believe that it would be most appropriate if the target volume is in the middle range, and we will empirically choose 5-50uL (model YB-P50). Is this the case? Let's take a look at the data results:

Let's use these four types of pipettes to do an error analysis:

It can be seen that the 2-20uL pipette is the most suitable in terms of accuracy and precision, and the target volume of 20uL is the most suitable.