Hi Jose,

Try contacting

Dr. Barry Pye,

Rothamsted Research, UK.

He may have some of the perfect solutions for your research.

Cheers

Vivek Kempraj

Thank you, Vivek. I'll contact him.

Hi Jose,

Maybe you could also contact Syntech (Germany), I think they also sell olfactometers

http://www.syntech.nl/

Hi there, ARS no longer exists. We placed an order about a year ago for $3000. They were happy to take the money and vanished after that. We came to know afterwards that the company had shut for some time already and we apparently are not the only ones having paid for items we will never receive. My advice to you is to find a local scientific glassblower. They very often are very creative people and are happy to make stuffs that are a bit different from classic orders they receive from chemistry labs.

Thanks, Antoine and Kevin. Kevin, I suspected something like this. It was too strange that a vendor does not respond to potential customers. Curiously, I recently found in another of my searches for olfactometer companies that some of the products originally sold by ARS appeared under another brand: Sigma-scientific LLC (www.sigma-sci.com), although the web does not give the impression of a strong and serious company.

Effectively, Syntech sells olfactometers, besides some other products related to insect behaviour, alghough the description and detailed information of their products is still under construction. I'll await for them.

Thank you Antoine.

ARS is now Sigma Scientific, LLC. You can contact Jim Estaver @ 12109 South Highway 441 Micanopy, FL 32667 352-505-5793 [email protected]

www.sigma-sci.com. He is affiliated with Rudy Strohschein (former ARS). I hope their business practices have improved. It used to take many months to get an order; our facility is located about 15 miles away.

Thanks Charles. Unfortunately our need for an olfactometer is compelling and we can not invest several months awaiting the confirmation and/or processing an order (and even worse, without the security of finally receiving the products). I am afraid I will have to build one from each of its components.

Did u check on this website:

http://www.ars-fla.com/mainpages/Bio-Assay/Y-Tube/Y-Tube.htm

They also have different types of olfactometers and air delivery system. Other option is you can build up the glass olfactometers from glass-blowing shops.

Thanks everyone for a very informative thread about olfactometers.  Can I resurrect the thread with a question for Jose Casas...were you able to order an olfactometer from Syntech?  To everyone on this thread, has anyone had dealings with Sigma Scientific since January when this thread was active and are they capable of delivering their four arm olfactometer setup in a reasonable amount of time?   Thanks. 

Hi, Tyler. Finally we entered in contact with Shanghai Bilon Instrument Co., through one of our local dealers, because this company offered an equipment very similar (apparently the same) than ars-fla. I did not try with Syntech because their web seems to be "frozen" for olfactometry (in fact they still show the same message in their olfactometers page: A detailed description will follow as soon as possible... , just like many months ago).

The product from Shanghai Bilon, which is commercially mediated by Alibaba, is correct, particularly the arena for the insects. It is true that some minor parts, some screw, were a little rusty, but in general was satisfactory.

Although, they sell the complete set up for the olfactometer: arena, rotameters, glass columns for drying and purifying air, glass vessels for the odour source, I would recomend only the arena. The rest of the material is better to be purchased from specialized suppliers (rotameters, for instance, better in cole-parmer).

Hi Jose,

I found this old question and I think that you ended up buying the same olfactometer as my laboratory did recently. I would appreciate it much if you could share some information on how did it go, does it work fine and if you conducted some smoke tests with it to validate the odor field (and what did you use for smoke). Our arena is the bigger version- activity field diameter 30 cm, so in total the olfactometer cage side measures around 60 cm. Due to this I am not sure if the flow usually advised as 300 ml/min is correct to be used with this olfactometer. 

Any advise would be appreciated and if you have published an article where you have used this device, could you share the title/link. 

Thank you!