Since this is lab stuff, there's no problem with just having another freaking power supply on the bench, right? Something with isolated output, ranging from perhaps a well filtered transformer, rectifier and cap, on up to a full blown programmable bench supply. (With a current limiting resistor of course.) Or you could do worse than have a AA cell and rheostat.
I recall reading about the early days of NMR (ca. 1950): they'd power the magnets (1.2T or so -- iron armature, lots of wire, lots of weight, and not much active volume!) with lead acid batteries, because that was the only thing available with the right voltage and current, and good enough stability and low enough noise to actually resolve the phenomenon (NMR is a parts-per-million game, and that goes for all aspects: stability of the magnetic field, its uniformity, frequency resolution of the detector, and the intensity of the absorption peak!). Of course, both the battery and the electromagnet have large temperature coefficients, so grad students were tasked with opening and closing the laboratory's windows to regulate temperature...
Tim