FireflySci No Longer Re-Calibrating Third Party Calibration Standards

Hi everyone!

So like every great company things come and things go. We’re so happy that we’ve been able to add so many awesome products throughout these last few years, but alas today we are gathered to bid farewell to one of our friends. That friend is third-party calibration filters.

So yeah, unfortunately, we are no longer offering re-calibration services for filters that are not made by us. We made this choice based on many different reasons, and I feel we owe an explanation for our decision.

Spectrophotometer Calibration Standards Materials

For starters, we have the material factor. We know exactly what materials we use to make our spectrophotometer calibration standards, but we cannot speak for other companies. Some companies use sub-standard materials while others use awesome ones. When a customer comes to us with a low-quality standard and we hit them with the truth about the performance of the standard, they expect us to explain why. Since we didn't choose the materials or have any say in the procedures that were used for doing the initial calibrations we cannot answer this question. Only the original manufacturer can explain the thought process they had when they designed the product.

ISO 17025 Accreditation

Did you know that some companies who manufacture calibration standards are not ISO 17025 accredited? ISO is not required when making calibration standards. Being ISO accredited is actually a huge pain, both financially and physically since so much more testing and paperwork is involved in being ISO accredited. Sometimes customers would bring us standards that were not from an ISO lab and would expect that we provide them with a certificate with our ISO stamp on it. Honestly, we don't like putting our reputation on the line like that. We are just not comfortable guaranteeing the performance of a standard that we did not manufacture.

So there you have it. I know we've done many re-calibrations for filters manufactured by Starna, Hellma, Thermo Fisher, Perkin Elmer, Molecular Devices, Stranaska, etc., so we apologize to those customers since we will not re-cal these filters moving forward.

Here's to your success!

The FireflySci Team