Replacing the Septum in Your GC Inlet

Description 

Septa replacement is one of our most common tasks when doing routine GC inlet maintenance on our gas chromatographs. Fortunately, it is also one of the easiest! In this example, we replace the septum in an Agilent 7890 gas chromatograph. The steps may vary on a different instrument or configuration.

Additional Resources

• GC Inlet Maintenance Quick Reference Guide
• Preventing GC Septum Problems

Restek Recommended Tools & Parts

• Replacement Septa

Transcript

Hey, folks! Welcome to another Restek tip. In this video, we are going to replace our GC inlet septum, one of the most common maintenance tasks that we perform. Like a lot of GC maintenance, we want to make sure that we cool things off first. Cool down our inlet, and when it is cool enough to work with, we can go ahead and remove the septum nut, and then use a tool to pop out the old, used septum.

When we get our new septum, we do want to make sure to keep it clean. We should have gloves on or be using clean tools as we take it out of its packaging and place it into the instrument. Once we've done that, we can go ahead and put the septum nut back, but here's a common problem that people run into. Many folks often overtighten that septum nut.

You should never need to use a wrench on it. Just putting it on finger-tight should be sufficient. That's it. That's really all that we need to be mindful of when we're replacing our GC inlet septum. Thanks very much for jointing us for this Restek tip.