© 2018 Elsevier B.V.The study of sub-barrier fusion is important to understand the dynamics of reactions involving weakly bound exotic nuclei. In most cases cross sections well below ? 1 mb need to be determined, but the limited beam intensity and background poses a great experimental challenge to measure it accurately. To overcome these problems we discuss a novel technique based on the use of radiochemical analysis. The advantages and limitations of this method are compared with the direct ?-counting technique using the reaction 208Pb(7Li, 210Po) at Elab = 39.3 MeV. The experiments were carried out at the BARC-TIFR Pelletron-Linac accelerator facility in Mumbai, India, and the radiochemical analysis at the University of Huelva, Spain.