A student surrounded by laboratory equipment

Describing your equipment

One of the objectives of the procedure section is to help your reader recreate your experiment.

It should, therefore, contain sufficient information that they can easily source the equipment that you used. The key word here is sufficient - only relevant information should be included.

Consider the example of a thermocouple (which is a type of thermometer that can show the temperature on a digital readout) used to carry out temperature measurements of a water bath being heated from ambient temperature to 80°C.

Take a look at the following options. There is clearly an increasing amount of information across these statements. The questions is: which of these is the most appropriate?

How much detail should you use when describing this piece of equipment?
The temperature was measured using a thermometer
The temperature was measured using a thermocouple
The temperature was measured using a type-K thermocouple
The temperature was measured using a type-K thermocouple which has a temperature range from -270 to 1200°C and an accuracy of +/- 1°C
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