Monitoring water quality

[Lloydy]

Hi all,

I was wondering what people use to monitor the quality of the water in their tanks.

At the moment I mainly rely on cheap API test strips which mainly look at the NO2 and NO3 but I have a few to test hardness, ph etc but I have always thought these things are not that good and inaccurate. I know you can get electronic systems which display and act as warning systems for temperature changes but is there something similar that monitors NO2, NO3, PH and so on?

I tend to think these will be easier to use rather than having to mess about dropping water onto test kits but are there any good ones and what do they cost?

[Richard B]

I have the strip tests plus a "cheap" digital thermometer & a mini-master test kit.

Good basic husbandry should be all that's needed but it it wise to have back-up tests on hand

[MatsP]

Like Richard, I don't think doing a lot of water testing in an established system is particularly important.

Measuring nitrate with a machine isn't particularly easy. There are some commercial equipment for this purpose, but they are neither maintenance free (that is, you need to "do stuff" to the machine to make it work correctly), nor are they "cost effective" in a home aquarium.

The ones using drops into water are supposedly more accurate than the strips.

If you use tap-water, I wouldn't worry about GH, KH or pH - they are all going to be high (around here - in other parts of this country, the water is soft - by nowhere within 50 miles of where we live - Dorset or Lancashire is probably the closest)

If you use RO-water, then that's a different story. KH is highly important to monitor in this case, since lack of KH will cause a pH crash, and that leads to filter failure (temporarily - once the pH is back to normal again, the filter-bacteria will start working again).

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Mats