Legionella testing companies: how to judge one on paper, including us

Thirty searches a month, $26.95 a click, competition 0.97: the most contested auction in this week’s pull, on one of its smallest queries. Nearly every bidder is a testing company, and the person searching is trying to tell them apart. This page is our attempt to help with that, and it applies to us exactly as it applies to anyone else. Nothing below is a claim about ourselves. It is a list of what to ask for, and what the answer should look like.

Start with the laboratory, not the salesperson

Every testing company either runs a laboratory or sends samples to one, and either arrangement is fine if it is stated. Ask which laboratory analyzes the samples, and whether legionella culture is within the scope of that laboratory’s accreditation. Accreditation, in this context, means that an independent accreditation body has assessed the laboratory against the international standard for testing laboratories and issued a certificate with a defined scope. The certificate names the body, an expiry date and the methods covered. Ask to see it, and check that the scope names the method you are buying: a laboratory can hold accreditation for chemistry and none for legionella culture. In the United States there is also a federal proficiency program for laboratories isolating legionella from environmental samples, and participation in it is another thing to ask about, with the same rule: ask for the document, not the sentence.

This site holds itself to that rule, and it runs no laboratory of its own to make a claim about. Ask any laboratory you approach for its accreditation certificate and its ELITE enrolment, separately, and read the scope of each. Which laboratories appear on the public ELITE roster is set out on this site.

Who draws the sampling plan, and against what

A testing company should ask for the schematic, or walk the system, before naming a number of samples. If the first thing a company sends is a price per bottle, it is selling bottles. The plan is the product: where the points are, why, first draw or flushed at each, and how the points are identified so that the next round finds them again. What a competent round looks like from the client’s side is set out under sampling and analysis.

How the sample travels

Ask what bottle is used and what neutralising agent it contains. Ask what is measured at the tap and recorded. Ask how long the laboratory allows between sampling and receipt, and how the company gets samples there inside it. Ask for a blank chain of custody form, which tells you whether one exists. A company that can answer all of that without looking anything up has done this before.

Which method, reported how

Culture or a molecular method, stated in the proposal, with the reason. The report should name the method, the laboratory, the detection limit of the method as the laboratory states it, and, where growth is found, the identification the laboratory performed. A number without a method is not a result. What a result can and cannot say is examined in what a legionella test tells you.

What the report should contain

• Every point sampled, identified precisely enough to find again.
• First draw or flushed, temperature and residual at the tap, for each.
• Date and time of sampling and of receipt at the laboratory.
• Method, laboratory, and the laboratory’s own report attached or referenced.
• Results per point, with units and the detection limit.
• What was not sampled and why, because the gaps are a finding.
• No statement about any person’s health, because no water result can support one.

Independence

Ask what else the company sells. A company that also cleans towers, treats water or sells chemicals has a stake in what the result shows, and the sample it takes after its own remediation is marking its own work. That is not an accusation; it is a structure, and a buyer is entitled to know it. This site sells none of it, which is the whole of its position, stated under about us.

The questions, in one place

Which laboratory, and may we see its accreditation scope. Who draws the plan, and from what. What bottle, what neutraliser, what is measured at the tap. What holding time, and how it is met. What method, and what the report contains. What else do you sell. Put those to every bidder on this query, and the field sorts itself. This site bids on none of it, which is why it can print the questions. What a sampling round involves, described in those terms, is under legionella testing services.