Wash bottle
 Plastic wash bottles for ethanol and water | |
| Other names | Squeeze Bottle |
|---|---|
| Uses | To clean lab glassware and other lab equipment. They are filled with water or other cleaning liquids, and poured over the tool that needs to be cleaned. |
| Notable experiments | The wash bottle is generally used in the clean-up phase of many experiments |
A wash bottle is a squeeze bottle with a nozzle, used to rinse various pieces of laboratory glassware, such as test tubes and round bottom flasks.
Wash bottles are sealed with a screw-top lid. When hand pressure is applied to the bottle, the liquid inside becomes pressurized and is forced out of the nozzle into a narrow stream of liquid.
Most wash bottles are made up of polyethylene, which is a flexible solvent-resistant petroleum-based plastic. Most bottles contain an internal dip tube allowing upright use.
Wash bottles may be filled with a range of common laboratory solvents and reagents, according to the work carried out in that lab. These include: deionized water, detergent solutions and rinse solvents such as acetone, isopropanol or ethanol. In biological labs it is common to keep sodium hypochlorite solution in a wash bottle to conveniently disinfect unneeded cultures.