Test methodology

Older methods pour your water through filters to “catch” chemicals before measuring, solid phase extraction. That step risks analyte loss, background contamination and human error. We use direct aqueous injection instead, bypassing SPE entirely, into new triple-quadrupole mass spectrometers sensitive enough to reach the detection limits without it.

Direct injection into an electrospray source can suffer matrix suppression, so we run a near-complete isotope dilution protocol, the same top-tier quantification approach used in EPA 533, 1633 and 1694. Every target analyte is quantified against either a stable isotope analogue or a closely eluting stable isotope internal standard, so matrix effects are mathematically normalised rather than assumed away. That is what holds data quality steady across the variability of real household water.

Industrial solvents and fuel byproducts evaporate before most tests can see them. We bubble clean gas through your sample, force the hidden compounds out, trap them, and read them with a high-speed detector, down to the equivalent of a single drop in an Olympic-sized pool.

The chemistry stays true to 524.2. What changes is the hardware: high-efficiency purge and trap concentrators paired with high-acquisition-rate mass spectrometers, and inert sample pathways that cut carryover between samples. The result is better spectral library matching, more confidence that a compound is what the instrument says it is, and reproducible quantitation at sub-ppb levels.

Older metal detectors get confused by harmless minerals, misreading them as toxic metals, or worse, missing the real thing. Our plasma instruments run hotter than the surface of the sun, breaking water down to its atoms, while collision-cell technology filters out the background noise.

The specific problem standard 200.8 struggles with is isobaric polyatomic interference: argon chloride, for instance, has the same mass as arsenic and reads as arsenic. Our instruments use kinetic energy discrimination and reaction gases to remove those interferences at the molecular level, before they ever reach the detector. That is what takes false positives off the table for lead, arsenic and mercury.