It’s worth remembering that the vacuum lines in the central vacuum system serving your lab are sucking gases and vapors and maybe bio-aerosols into a common conduit. Once there, they mix with the emissions from other vacuum applications. As long as they stay in the vacuum lines, they will cause you little problem (except for the long-term corrosion of the piping network.)
But what happens when you are already operating and application and someone opens a valve elsewhere? Vapors rush into the newly opened valve, creating a higher pressure point in the vacuum lines. Unfortunately, your operation under vacuum is the low-pressure point. The introduced vapors or gases can move straight to your application, contaminating your sample, or simply causing a pressure spike that may violate a critical parameter.
VACUU·LAN® local vacuum networks protect your science in two ways. By producing and controlling the vacuum in each lab, there is no risk of cross-contamination from another lab. And, by equipping each vacuum turret with its own check valve to control flow in the network, work at one turret is much less likely to cause pressure spikes or cross-contamination at another turret on the same network.
Click on the link to our 1 minute cross-contamination video which a smoke test is used to show how a VACUU·LAN® network protects you from pressure interference and cross-contamination between vacuum ports.