Water testing kits

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Gershom

Candiru
MFK Member
Sep 13, 2024
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How many people use reagent kits?
Are they worth the trouble? Are the color differences really easier to read than test strips, and are they more accurate?

I have trouble reading hardness and alkalinity on the test strips!
 
I'll be honest (going to get beat up here) I had problems reading the API test bottles never tried the test strips. My tank is very mature going on 10 years plus I'm over filtered only have a 9in female Festae and 11in male Midas in a 125, with 3 80% WC a week.
I haven't tested my water in over 4 years
 
Sometimes, one must tailor the test kit, to sensitivity to individual colors.
If you are slightly color blind in the red (pink) hues, you may want to chose a kit with a green colormetric.
To me the API liquid tests are easy to read
pH (left) using the high range reagent reads about 8.2, nitrate undetectable

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The strips are a ittle less obvious , but coinside.
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I believe Apera make strips that use a more green distrinction
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There are probes that read the numbers for you, if needed.
 
Duane—
Your last pic, for a chloride level—is that reading the color of the liquid? I’m guessing that is a piece of professional equipment.

I looked for (inexpensive) electronic testers and got the impression they were really using just conductivity, then maybe gave readouts in other ways. I have a TDS meter (which I use constantly), and I suspect it does that.

Do you know of other types, that actually measure alkalinity or hardness?
 
My method is...

Use API drip kit when I need accuracy...
Use test strips when I'm confirming consistency...

I like that I can just dip the strip and a few seconds later I get readings across the board. And if everything looks like it's supposed to, I am confident things are what they're supposed to be.

But if something is off on the dip strip... Or if I'm investigating a suspected problem... Or if I'm playing with adjusting something... I go to the API drip tests to see what they real numbers are.

That said... I rarely use either anymore...
 
Yes, I worked in a water quality lab for about 20 years as a microbiologist/chemist, and had access to loads of sophisticated equipment, some I could afford some couldn't.
I would sometimes use a Hach Conductivit/salinity meter if using salt as a med.
But where I lived the source water was very stable (Lake Michigan) so I seldom needed to test anything other than the tanks nitrates.
And I usually kept only species tolerant of my tap water.

I have found the same stability here in Panama, but here again,I only keep species from Panamanian streams and come from similar water parameter environments.
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Above, the water parameters where I catch my cichlids
Below, my tanks parameters.
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It's been many years since I tested my water constantly as many aquarists seem to do. The last few homes I have owned all had private wells for a water supply. They weren't identical to each other, but they were all 100% stable in all parameters; nothing ever changed.

Water testing lets you get a handle on the parameters of your source water, and more importantly tells you how the water is altered/degraded in your aquarium, and how fast this degradation occurs. But, again, once you learn how your aquarium runs...and once you have developed a water change regimen that works for you...what is the point of constantly looking at test tubes or test strips that tell you the same thing every day, every week, every month? If something happens that makes you suspect a change has or might have occurred, sure, test it if that makes you feel better...but personally, my first instinct when something seems wonky is not to test my water; it's to change it.

I have one single tank that is a bit more crowded and which I am still in the habit of testing sporadically, just to see where my nitrate highs and lows tend to be with my normal feeding and water change schedule. Even that one is starting to become familiar; testing will likely slow and then nearly stop sometime soon.

A few years back I started getting more seriously into breeding fish in outdoor stock tanks during my area's laughably short summer. Filling those tanks, combined with filling/topping up my single inground dug pond, meant that for a week or two in the spring, I needed another 1500 or 2000 gallons of water, in addition to the normal 1000 or so I use weekly throughout the year. I was concerned about overtaxing my well, so I got in the habit of using large amounts of snowmelt water (very soft, low pH) mixed in with my hard alkaline well water for those outdoor tanks. For a few weeks each spring I was running around with test tubes and reagents and colour charts, testing everything in sight. I even got myself a digital TDS meter, a very cool little toy. It was nice to actually see different colours and readings for once...but within a couple years it got to the point where I could accurately predict what my overall pH and hardness would be simply by controlling the ratios of well water to melt water. Nitrate levels outdoors were always the same...zero. So again...why keep testing?

I used the test strips a bit last year instead of the liquid tests. I don't think the strips are quite as accurate, simply because they don't seem to be as consistent. Three back-to-back tests with strips seem to give me results that vary noticeably...although not significantly...compared to reagents. But the strips are so much more convenient and so much faster that I can see switching over to them for the bulk of my infrequent casual testing. I think they are also a bit easier to see and read than test tubes. I've read and until recently I believed that the strips are not worth messing with, that liquid tests are the only choice...but I am starting to think that people prefer liquid reagents just because, as one of my granddaughters says, them seem more "sciencey". :)
 
Thanks to all for the input!
Part of my problem is that I (mistakenly) tried to adjust water to suit incoming fish, when I should have let them adapt to my conditions.

But in addition, I would like to try breeding my Satanopercas, and I’m not sure how much I would need to change for them. Is it reasonable to rely on the TDS meter, mixing RO water and tap water to make fairly soft water (80-90 ppm) ?
 
I'll be honest (going to get beat up here) I had problems reading the API test bottles never tried the test strips. My tank is very mature going on 10 years plus I'm over filtered only have a 9in female Festae and 11in male Midas in a 125, with 3 80% WC a week.
I haven't tested my water in over 4 years
I have juvenile festae—I’d love to see pics of your big mama.
 
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Thanks to all for the input!
Part of my problem is that I (mistakenly) tried to adjust water to suit incoming fish, when I should have let them adapt to my conditions.

But in addition, I would like to try breeding my Satanopercas, and I’m not sure how much I would need to change for them. Is it reasonable to rely on the TDS meter, mixing RO water and tap water to make fairly soft water (80-90 ppm) ?
Ya know, reading this post ^ makes me think that the modern age of fishkeeping, in which many people are ordering fish by mail from all over the continent and maybe beyond, is exacerbating the whole right-fish-wrong-water issue in a way that didn't exist back when all or most fish were purchased locally.

I still buy everything locally, either from a local retailer/importer about an hour away from my home or from local breeders who sell/trade at club auctions. So every fish I buy...and I don't buy that many!...was either born and raised in my local water (which is not hugely different than the water from my private well) or at least was brought in by an expert with many years of experience acclimating many hundreds of thousands of fish from all over the world. Either way, the individual fish that end up in my home tanks come home in bags full of essentially the same water in which I plan to keep them. That's a big advantage, IMHO. When that local importer gets a shipment of 500 wild-caught Cardinal Tetras (just a random example...) that were caught a few days or weeks earlier in a river with a pH of 6.2 and maybe 30ppm hardness...and were shipped in that same water up to the Great White North...they were then forced to acclimate to a pH of around 7.5 and a hardness that easily tops 300ppm. How many die in the first few days after arrival, even under the expert care of a quality importer?

Then a few days later, I or some other poor schmuck takes a bag of them home. It's only an hour or so drive, and the water in my tank isn't hugely different than that in the bag...but the fish are still reeling from a long period of hardship and stress. Maybe a few more die...and maybe some more will show long-term deleterious effects in upcoming years (in larger long-lived species, like Oscars) but the worst part of their ordeal has already passed by the time I get them into my house.

Contrast that to a typical buyer today, somewhere in the U.S., who orders fish by mail from all over the country. Surely there are some places in the country with soft/acidic water, similar to the water the fish originated in, so the fish suffer less of a shock when they first arrive in the country, and that's what those fish are packed in for the journey. Then they get to your house, and your water is likely closer to mine in chemistry...so that single biggest acclimation hurdle is faced by the fish when you open the bag at home, rather than when they first arrived in the country. Those initial deaths due to a sudden change in water chemistry are now going to occur in your living room rather than at the importer/distributor, aren't they?

I'm just thinking out loud here; no idea if this idea has much or any validity. It seems worthy of consideration to me. Would love to hear some comments from others with a better grasp of the logistics of importation.

Sorry to derail your thread, @Gershom , but it seemed at least semi-related to your original question.

Edited to add: I wonder if it's a coincidence that African rift-lake cichlids make up a disproportionately huge percentage of the fish my local guy stocks...or if that's related to the fact that our water is pretty good for those fish, straight out of the tap?
 
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