You cant do anything at all with $10k per station. Literally nothing. Minimum $250k “Total VOC” is useless, because without identifying the specific chemical s

You cant do anything at all with $10k per station. Literally nothing. Minimum $250k “Total VOC” is useless, because without identifying the specific chemical sub-family (e.g. differentiation between ethyl acrylate vs butyl acrylate) you wont be able to tell which company is responsible for the leak or what the leak is. > self-contained automated lab Is roughly correct and is the level generally needed. It may be possible to do a bit cheaper, but probably not less than $250,000. Go too cheap and everything will be clogged and broken all the time and you wont get any actionable data for the money you spent. A spectrometer or chromatograph is just one piece of the overall system, what you’ll want to search or build is a “gas analyzer” for the specific compounds. Take a look here for what those look like: https://www.emerson.com/en-us/automation/measurement-instrumentation/gas-analysis https://www.emerson.com/en-us/automation/measurement-instrum... They all also need pretty constant skilled maintenance from expensive technicians. It may be possible to design and manufacture cheaper continuous gas samplers and analyzers but I wouldn’t do that just for this project, that would be its own startup and would need to compete on its own in the industrial market, which is heavily reliant on incumbent relationships and customers are often willing to spend a lot more so they get reliability and are generally unwilling to bet even one hour of potential production time. Because each hour of production can be millions of dollars of revenue, it justifies spending an extra $100k to prevent that downtime. There’s not actually a lot of cost pressure on these gas analyzers at the moment. But if every plant was required to install 10 of them by law, then maybe buyers would care when they need to buy them for several plants at the same time.