General question about opentrons pipettes generation and lifetime

Our lab was given an opentrons from another group with first generation pepettes. We are relying on the device more and more and hence I wanted to ask, should we invest in gen2 pipettes. In particular:

  1. Are Gen2 pipettes superior to Gen1? In what respect?
  2. I understand opentrons pipettes are not serviced. Is there a recommended lifetime for the pipettes?
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@pavel_shliaha

I would highly recommend using our Gen-2 pipettes. One of the main reasons we introduced the second generation was that we saw Gen-1 pipettes unable to pick up tips properly and consistently. This impacted the pipette’s performance in how they aspirated/dispensed liquid, held on to tips, and how the tip sat on the pipette. When we saw these issues in the field, we decided to engineer the Gen-2 pipette to resolve them. The improvements we introduced have drastically decreased these types of issues we see in the field.

We recommend replacing the pipettes yearly, which we calculate to be about 1000 hours of actual pipetting.