As I had to spend most of last night helping a friend rebuild his loop after the plasticizer built up in his jet plate slowed his flow rate to a crawl I thought I would make this thread to hopefully maybe help a couple of people.
If you look around the internet you will usually come upon two opinions on Tygon tubing, firstly an older one that it's the best ever and the rolls royce of tubing, secondly a newer one that it's rubbish and not worth the premium, which is right? they both are, confused? most likely. You see Tygon is a company, a company that makes things, some of those things are tubes and not all are equal. To put it simply when WC was in it's infancy a lot of people used high grade Tygon tubing because it was excellent and this caused it to build up a reputation in the community, because of that numerous retailers (not OcUK) sell Tygon tubing, but to maximize profits they sell the mid/low grade versions at high grade prices banking on the Tygon name to shift the stock.
The are many types of Tygon tubing but the most commonly referenced these days are:
Food grade (I.E Tygon B-44-xx), not seen that much in WC these days, you would expect something certified for food use to be impeccable, but it's certified in the USA not the EU (laxer standards) and despite what you would expect this will leech some plasticizer.
Laboratory grade (I.E Tygon R-3603), this seems to be the most common sold to the WC market sadly, sounds great doesn't it? my friend thought so, laboratory conjures up images of this tubing being used to connect the flux capacitor cooling to the reactor isotope turbocharger, but in reality this is something you would use for hooking up a bunsen burner instead of a rubber hose, not for transporting sensitive chemical experiments, again this will leech plasticizer.
Medical grade (I.E Tygon S-50-HL), this one, is the real deal, put simply if it is certified and used for kidney dialysis, heart bypass and delivering cancer meds, then it's not going to leech, "tested on humans" is a good standard, especially when their American and thus liable to sue for looking at them funny.
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TLDR: get the medical grade stuff, though in all honesty these days it would probably be easier/cheaper just to use that new Primochill stuff as that's building a great reputation.
If you look around the internet you will usually come upon two opinions on Tygon tubing, firstly an older one that it's the best ever and the rolls royce of tubing, secondly a newer one that it's rubbish and not worth the premium, which is right? they both are, confused? most likely. You see Tygon is a company, a company that makes things, some of those things are tubes and not all are equal. To put it simply when WC was in it's infancy a lot of people used high grade Tygon tubing because it was excellent and this caused it to build up a reputation in the community, because of that numerous retailers (not OcUK) sell Tygon tubing, but to maximize profits they sell the mid/low grade versions at high grade prices banking on the Tygon name to shift the stock.
The are many types of Tygon tubing but the most commonly referenced these days are:
Food grade (I.E Tygon B-44-xx), not seen that much in WC these days, you would expect something certified for food use to be impeccable, but it's certified in the USA not the EU (laxer standards) and despite what you would expect this will leech some plasticizer.
Laboratory grade (I.E Tygon R-3603), this seems to be the most common sold to the WC market sadly, sounds great doesn't it? my friend thought so, laboratory conjures up images of this tubing being used to connect the flux capacitor cooling to the reactor isotope turbocharger, but in reality this is something you would use for hooking up a bunsen burner instead of a rubber hose, not for transporting sensitive chemical experiments, again this will leech plasticizer.
Medical grade (I.E Tygon S-50-HL), this one, is the real deal, put simply if it is certified and used for kidney dialysis, heart bypass and delivering cancer meds, then it's not going to leech, "tested on humans" is a good standard, especially when their American and thus liable to sue for looking at them funny.
-----
TLDR: get the medical grade stuff, though in all honesty these days it would probably be easier/cheaper just to use that new Primochill stuff as that's building a great reputation.
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