The gauges that are often built into many of the vacuum ovens on the market are, in fact, not the best gauges for this application. These small, circular gauges are “inches of mercury” gauges. In this video and blog, we overview the 3 reasons why you should add a DigiVac Bullseye Precision Gauge, a vacuum gauge that is much more appropriate for use with vacuum ovens.

Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Inches of mercury gauges don’t have much resolution. 1 inch of mercury is equal to about 26 Torr. Therefore, you wouldn’t really be able to use it to measure any type of deep vacuum. This type of measurement can be useful for other applications (measuring 100 Torr and above), but not more than it.
2. Vacuum measurement for vacuum ovens should be precise, and not subjective. The information that inches of mercury gauges provide to an operator are essentially estimates, or “rules of thumb”, telling you where you are relative to Atmosphere versus deep vacuum.
3. Lastly, this gauge is not good for any type of medium or deep vacuum. For that, the inches of mercury gauge would not have the resolution to even come close. For example, it wouldn’t be able to show you, if you were at, 8 milliTorr.

If you have a vacuum oven, you need a high quality gauge that allows you to measure these ranges and measurement accurately.