[QUOTE=Cristy Keister] or does it gradually raise it?[/QUOTE]
Uh - sorry - I mean LOWER it.
Nutrient Test Kits?
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Cristy Keister
- Posts: 2215
- Joined: Sat Nov 29, 2003 6:52 am
- Location: MD
[QUOTE=krisw] What nutrient test kits does everyone use? I've done a lot of searching on the web, and it seems like the *best* kits are professional ones from Lamott, but those are pretty expensive. [/QUOTE]
Well good products cost money, thats the way I feel at least. Everything else is unreliable junk and likely to trip you up more than help ya out, especially if your lighting levels are high enough. LaMotte's replacement reagents are relatively cheap and the kit as a whole is worth every dollar. This, in combination with my Pinpoint pH probe are really the only two test "kits" I need.... I don't mind paying money for something that works but unfortunately there have been few products I have found that actually works... I guess its something American and why Walmart is the no 1 retailer in America, folks want a lot of stuff made cheap instead of one thing made nice that will last forever... Sorry about the rant but when you add up the cost of the all kits I've tried before shelling out the money for quality it far exceeds the cost of what I have now... <img border="0" src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0">
Jeff
Well good products cost money, thats the way I feel at least. Everything else is unreliable junk and likely to trip you up more than help ya out, especially if your lighting levels are high enough. LaMotte's replacement reagents are relatively cheap and the kit as a whole is worth every dollar. This, in combination with my Pinpoint pH probe are really the only two test "kits" I need.... I don't mind paying money for something that works but unfortunately there have been few products I have found that actually works... I guess its something American and why Walmart is the no 1 retailer in America, folks want a lot of stuff made cheap instead of one thing made nice that will last forever... Sorry about the rant but when you add up the cost of the all kits I've tried before shelling out the money for quality it far exceeds the cost of what I have now... <img border="0" src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0">
Jeff
[QUOTE=JLudwig] LaMotte's replacement reagents are relatively cheap and the kit as a whole is worth every dollar. This, in combination with my Pinpoint pH probe are really the only two test "kits" I need.... [/QUOTE]
Jeff, this is good stuff to know. So, is the test kit you have from LaMotte the Iron test kit? Or do you have a more comprehensive kit? Thanks!
Jeff, this is good stuff to know. So, is the test kit you have from LaMotte the Iron test kit? Or do you have a more comprehensive kit? Thanks!
[QUOTE=krisw] So, is the test kit you have from LaMotte the Iron test kit? Or do you have a more comprehensive kit? Thanks![/QUOTE]
No... iron testing is a non-starter... plants have very very low concentrations of iron in tissue relative to how much we add to the water. My point here is that of all the iron that is added only a small fraction is actually bioavailable so its not clear what exactly you are measuring when you take an iron reading. Also, iron from different ferts is typically formulated differently (iron gluconate from SeaChem, iron DPTA from TMG, iron EDTA from others, etc) so this makes the reading even more meaningless. Plants are the best iron test kit! I'll stick my neck out a little here, adding a ton of iron doesn't cause algae by itself so its okay to experiment with much higher than recommended levels to see if the quality of growth increases... I add 0.3-0.5ppm of Fe a day to my very high light tank.
Phosphate has a similar problem, but not as bad, but it does seem the substrate can act as a 'sink' so again this is IMO hard to test for.
I use exclusively nitrate and pH testing, I think this is all anyone ever needs (fish stores/water reports can do KH/GH, only really needs to be done once or twice). pH probe is a bit overkill but we are working on breeding killies so this gets used more in that context... keep CO2 levels high is the take home message. Now, with trace added in excess, nitrate can be used as a proxy for everything else. I assume no K+ in tap and that nitrate in tap is 10:1 N:P. Allow me to explain a little... my tap is 17ppm NO3, I change 50% weekly (~8ppm NO3) and add roughly 10ppm K+ to this change. This is usually enough for almost all my tanks, I will sometimes add 5-10ppm NO3 weekly, since I use KNO3 no extra K is needed and I would add 0.3-0.6ppm PO4, G worked this out in another thread.
The LaMotte NO3 kit is accurate to 1ppm NO3 so you can remove any questions about nutrients this way. I think you'll find you have a lot more N around than what most other kits tell you, the recommendation of 20-30ppm NO3 weekly you see on the APD is absolute junk if you ask me, I've never seen uptake rates like that with a LaMotte kit, even in my fishless tanks... less is more if anything these kits have helped me hold back from dosing too much (which is the natural tendancy I think)
Jeff
No... iron testing is a non-starter... plants have very very low concentrations of iron in tissue relative to how much we add to the water. My point here is that of all the iron that is added only a small fraction is actually bioavailable so its not clear what exactly you are measuring when you take an iron reading. Also, iron from different ferts is typically formulated differently (iron gluconate from SeaChem, iron DPTA from TMG, iron EDTA from others, etc) so this makes the reading even more meaningless. Plants are the best iron test kit! I'll stick my neck out a little here, adding a ton of iron doesn't cause algae by itself so its okay to experiment with much higher than recommended levels to see if the quality of growth increases... I add 0.3-0.5ppm of Fe a day to my very high light tank.
Phosphate has a similar problem, but not as bad, but it does seem the substrate can act as a 'sink' so again this is IMO hard to test for.
I use exclusively nitrate and pH testing, I think this is all anyone ever needs (fish stores/water reports can do KH/GH, only really needs to be done once or twice). pH probe is a bit overkill but we are working on breeding killies so this gets used more in that context... keep CO2 levels high is the take home message. Now, with trace added in excess, nitrate can be used as a proxy for everything else. I assume no K+ in tap and that nitrate in tap is 10:1 N:P. Allow me to explain a little... my tap is 17ppm NO3, I change 50% weekly (~8ppm NO3) and add roughly 10ppm K+ to this change. This is usually enough for almost all my tanks, I will sometimes add 5-10ppm NO3 weekly, since I use KNO3 no extra K is needed and I would add 0.3-0.6ppm PO4, G worked this out in another thread.
The LaMotte NO3 kit is accurate to 1ppm NO3 so you can remove any questions about nutrients this way. I think you'll find you have a lot more N around than what most other kits tell you, the recommendation of 20-30ppm NO3 weekly you see on the APD is absolute junk if you ask me, I've never seen uptake rates like that with a LaMotte kit, even in my fishless tanks... less is more if anything these kits have helped me hold back from dosing too much (which is the natural tendancy I think)
Jeff
