I'm doing a lot of water testing right now on my tanks as I've made a good deal of changes to some tanks, including removal of the substrate and replacing it with new gravel or sand with a layer of growth medium for the plants. I didn't change the filters or the medium.
Anyway, all's fine in them except for the one new tank I set up for the dwarf rasboras. This was totally empty and unused for 3 years. I did a large gravel bottom with a layer of growth medium on top in net pouches, and topped it off with sand. I included a bit of nice looking dried out wood that I found in our local woods, I gave it a weeks worth of soaking first after initially boiling it.
Knowing that a fish-in cycle needs careful attention I'm checking the water at least twice a day.
I'm mostly showing an acceptable level of ammonia on the NT Labs test kit (yellow) but seem to be getting constant nitrite and nitrate readings towards the mid level of pinky red. Both clear of the skull and crossbones though. I change 50% of the water twice a day to keep control.
I just emptied the contents of a freshly squeezed sponge filter from another tank into this one just to see if it gives a boost to the reduction of the bad stuff.
Anyway, as you can imagine, such constant checking takes its toll on the testing kit liquids. I have already used my mathematical skills to figure out that a level of 5ml using 5 drips from a bottle can be whittled down to 1 ml and 1 drip. Same result. However it still uses up a lot of liquid when doing multiple daily checks.
The GH test is even worse. It has to be done with a 5ml sample as you can't equally divide the necessary amount of drops from the 2 test liquids. Then when the GH is hard it takes up to 20 drops from bottle B, or more depending on the local water supply, so that gives a very limited life to that bottle.
What I'd like to know, penny for penny and with quality of chemicals in mind, is there a way to buy separate bottles of this stuff in larger volumes, or is there some other way to do the tests with another less expensive test kit.
Anyway, all's fine in them except for the one new tank I set up for the dwarf rasboras. This was totally empty and unused for 3 years. I did a large gravel bottom with a layer of growth medium on top in net pouches, and topped it off with sand. I included a bit of nice looking dried out wood that I found in our local woods, I gave it a weeks worth of soaking first after initially boiling it.
Knowing that a fish-in cycle needs careful attention I'm checking the water at least twice a day.
I'm mostly showing an acceptable level of ammonia on the NT Labs test kit (yellow) but seem to be getting constant nitrite and nitrate readings towards the mid level of pinky red. Both clear of the skull and crossbones though. I change 50% of the water twice a day to keep control.
I just emptied the contents of a freshly squeezed sponge filter from another tank into this one just to see if it gives a boost to the reduction of the bad stuff.
Anyway, as you can imagine, such constant checking takes its toll on the testing kit liquids. I have already used my mathematical skills to figure out that a level of 5ml using 5 drips from a bottle can be whittled down to 1 ml and 1 drip. Same result. However it still uses up a lot of liquid when doing multiple daily checks.
The GH test is even worse. It has to be done with a 5ml sample as you can't equally divide the necessary amount of drops from the 2 test liquids. Then when the GH is hard it takes up to 20 drops from bottle B, or more depending on the local water supply, so that gives a very limited life to that bottle.
What I'd like to know, penny for penny and with quality of chemicals in mind, is there a way to buy separate bottles of this stuff in larger volumes, or is there some other way to do the tests with another less expensive test kit.
