Dear Valerie,

Unfortunately, you probably won't find many on this mb who do the urine collections on a regular basis.  Besides myself, I know only one or two others who have recently started.  Hopefully, they will see your note and post their experiences, too, so you have a basis for comparison.

Re. when to start and stop each day: Generally, the method that you describe is the one that we follow, as well.  As far as whether to consider the 6:30 am or 7:45 "pee" to be the first of the morning: I would probably just try to be consistent from one morning to the next, and get as close to a 24-hr window as possible.  If it's off by an hour or so, from one day to the next, it probably won't make a huge amount of difference. 

Our lab requires an acetic acid preservative to test for 17-KS and Pregnanetriole.  They used to tell me they needed a separate, no-preservative sample to run creatinine; now they run all three from the one sample.  I do know that they run the creatinine in-house and send out the other two.  I'm not sure if this impacts which tests need the preservative and which ones don't.