Skip to content

How do I reconstitute a vial?

What the powder, the water and the barrel each do — and why the amount of water is a choice about measurement, not about dose.

Reconstitution · 1 min read

Your vial5mgin2mL

2.50mg/mLis your concentration

Concentration 2.50 mg/mL.

What does the water actually do?

The powder in the vial is a fixed number of milligrams. Adding bacteriostatic water does not change that number. It changes how much liquid those milligrams are spread through — the concentration — and therefore how far along the barrel any given dose lands.

More water means a longer, easier-to-read draw. Less water means a shorter one. That is the whole trade-off, and it is a measurement question rather than a medical one.

What does your vial say?

The number printed on the label, before you mix anything.

Vial strength

What dose are you aiming for?

Your target, not ours. Lovapep does not recommend a dose.

Target dose

How much water will you add?

This is your choice. It changes nothing about the dose — only how much liquid that dose sits in, and therefore how easy it is to measure.

Bacteriostatic water to add
Draw to10unitson a 1 mL U-100 syringe

That is 0.10 mL of liquid.

Measurable on this barrel

Lovapep is a tracker and calculator, not medical advice. It reports what your own numbers produce and flags when they look unmeasurable.

Where this goes wrong

Reading units as millilitres

On a U-100 syringe the 40 mark is 0.4 mL — not 40 mL, and not 4 mL. The barrel runs 0 to 100 units across a single millilitre.

Changing the water next time

If your next vial gets a different amount of water, the draw changes with it. The number you wrote on a sticky note last month does not carry over.

Mixing mg and mcg

A vial is labelled in milligrams; doses are often discussed in micrograms. One slipped decimal is a thousandfold difference, and it still looks plausible.

Keep reading

Educational tracker. Not medical advice. Lovapep does not sell, supply or source any compound.

The calculator, and a second set of eyes

Lovapep logs what you take, does this arithmetic for you, and flags when the numbers you entered look like a typo. iOS and Android.

One email when it is ready. Nothing else.