Tropical Fish Forum
Tropical Fish Keeping Help and Advice => Fishtank Filtration and Cycling => Topic started by: sharpandroid on September 06, 2019, 04:24:26 PM
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I bought a couple of Aqua care test strip kits today, here are the results, comments invited.
Ammonia 0
pH 6.8/7.2
(KH) dH 3
(GH) dH 28
Nitrate 0
Nitrite 0
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Hmmm, the readings seem a bit odd.
First question - is that tank water or tap water? If it's tank water, what are your tap water readings?
It is unusual for UK water in the UK to have no nitrate. Even my water from Kielder Water up in the wilds of Northumberland has between 0 and 5 ppm.
The GH and KH - what are the units, German degrees or ppm?
It would be virtually impossible to measure 3 ppm for KH, so that must be German degrees? And if it is, that means GH should be the same unit and 28 German degrees is much higher than I've ever seen.
Can I suggest you search on your water company's website for hardness - ie GH - though they are unlikely to give KH (they'll call it alkalinity if they do give it). Also look at your water quality report to see what your nitrate is. Water quality reports usually give a minimum level, a maximum level and a mean level - look for the mean level.
These should tell you how accurate the strips are.
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That was the tank water, last water change was 6 days ago.
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Could you test your tap water for comparison, please. Then we'll know if something in the tank is different, and we can look at why.
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If you can let us see a photo of the range of potential readings from your test strips container, that would be helpful too. There's a possibility that that might explain some of the readings you have - for example, nitrate might look closer to 0 than whatever the next unit of measurement is.
Can I suggest you search on your water company's website for hardness - ie GH - though they are unlikely to give KH (they'll call it alkalinity if they do give it).
The water company may give it in German degrees hardness or CaCO3 (or something else) but let us know what they give as the unit of measurement plus what the result is.
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I forgot about the unit :-[
A lot of UK water companies give hardness as mg/l calcium which needs to be converted into the two units used in fishkeeping.
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I think it's a waste of time testing the tap water, my aquarium doesn't contain just tap water, the readings I got from the tests show that all is well regarding Ammonia, Nitrate and Nitrite in the tank, I understand that the water is hard and that is because of where I live.
Aluminium 6.6 200 µg Al/l
Calcium 80.9 - mg Ca/l
Colour 1.2 20 mg/l Pt/Co Scale
Conductivity 485 2500 µS/cm
Copper 0.0741 2 mg Cu/l
EColi 0 0 no/100ml
Fluoride 0.1 1.5 mg F/l
Iron 8.8 200 µg Fe/l
Lead 1.77 10 µg Pb/l
Magnesium 9.6 - mg Mg/l
Manganese 1.8 50 µg Mn/I
Nitrate 13.68 50 mg NO3/l
Nitrite 0.022 0.5 mg NO2/l
Sodium 17.8 200 mg Na/l
TotalColiforms 0 0 no/100ml
Turbidity 0.16 4 NTU
pH 7.1 6.5 - 9.5 pH Units
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Hi,
The two readings that I question are KH and GH. Starting with GH, you measured 28dH, which is almost Liquid Rock. It is inconsistent with a KH of 3dH.
JPC
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That was my concern as well. I wondered if there was something in the tank that was increasing the GH, which is why I asked for the tap water level to compare it with.
With the water quality report, the first figure is the test results, the second is the maximum allowed in drinking water. It shows that the nitrate level in your tap water is 13.6 ppm, which is not the same as the 0 shown by the test strips.
This, combined with the readings for KH and GH, suggest to me that the test trips are not terribly accurate.
What does the water company give for hardness - that will be in a different place from the water quality report.