Labware & Consumables

Buying guide

Price here spans a wider gap than on any single category page, because the set runs from a throwaway consumable to a fitted-out room. Listings start at EUR 1 and reach EUR 176.868. The bottom end is where the volume sits: vials, test tubes, beakers and filtration supplies, bought by the box and priced accordingly. The expensive end is not the chemistry at all but the fabric around it, laboratory furniture, flooring, modules and large enclosures, where a single listing covers equipment that outlasts the experiments run on it. Quartz glassware and precision sample cells sit between the two, costing more than ordinary glass because the material and the optical tolerance are the point.

Condition splits in a way worth knowing before buying. 86 percent of the listings are used. For durable glass and furniture that distinction carries less weight than it would for an instrument, since a sound flask is a sound flask, though consumables that contact samples are a different matter and want checking against the work they will do. Across this ground the catalogue holds 12161 listings from 258 verified suppliers and distributors, which is what makes it practical to match a consumable to its instrument rather than ordering blind. Used and refurbished items are listed below new prices; where a warranty matters on a larger purchase such as furniture or an enclosure, it is arranged in consultation for the specific listing, so the detail sits with the listing itself rather than with any blanket rule.

Types of Labware & Consumables

Labware and consumables draw on glassware, filtration supplies, cuvettes and sample cells, vials and test tubes, safety equipment and laboratory furniture, each tied to a different moment at the bench. These items are not a sequence in the way a protocol is: a lab does not work through them in order. Instead they cluster around the stages of a job, and the questions below follow those clusters rather than a fixed path.

Which glassware holds the reaction?

The core of most wet work sits in glass. Beakers and flasks take the bulk handling, condensers and distillation glassware carry the separations, and funnels move liquid between them. The choice is governed by two things the catalogue can show and a category page cannot: the volume the work needs and the chemistry the glass must survive. Borosilicate covers most of it, but quartz glassware exists on the catalogue for a reason, since it passes ultraviolet light where ordinary glass blocks it, which matters the moment the reaction is being watched by a spectrometer rather than by eye. Where a condenser feeds a receiving flask, the two constrain each other: ground-glass joints have to match, and a mismatch there is the sort of thing a single-category listing will never warn you about.

What matches the instrument downstream?

A large share of consumables exists only to serve a machine. Cuvettes and sample cells are the clearest case. A cuvette is chosen by its path length and its material, and both are dictated by the analyser it goes into, not by preference. Quartz cells for ultraviolet work, optical glass or plastic for the visible range, and a sealed sample cell where the solvent is volatile. Vials and test tubes sit in the same category of fit: an autosampler expects a vial of a given height and septum, and the wrong one jams the tray rather than the chemistry. Filtration supplies follow the same logic one step earlier, since the membrane has to take the solvent and pass the particle size the next instrument assumes has already been removed. This is where the catalogue earns its place: it lets a buyer line up the consumable against the instrument before committing, which a page about cuvettes alone cannot do because it does not know what the cuvette feeds.

How does the lab around the work get equipped?

Not everything here touches a sample. Laboratory furniture, tables, flooring and modules are the fabric the work sits on, and enclosures and safety equipment are what keep the worker out of the hazard. These are infrequent, high-consequence purchases rather than daily consumables, and they are grouped here because a bench without the right surface or the right extraction is not a bench that can run the chemistry above. Clothing and other safety supplies close the gap between the glassware and the person holding it. A lab fitting out a new room reaches into this part of the catalogue once; a lab running an established room rarely does.