ive had my aquarium up and running for some time now w/o testing. today i bought some on-the-ball-park test strips. they have nitrate nitrite alkalinity ph and hardness. it has 5 colors on the strip and i put it in...i couldnt figure out how to read it. it says exactly as is

Nitrate
FW: below 40 ppm
SW: below 40 pm

it says this for all of them with diff numbers...everythings in ppm. believe it or not, ive been an aquariust for years and have never done water tests. its probably something very simple, i just dont understand.


any idea what fw and sw means?



EDIT: ok freshwater saltwater..ha..ha...took me a second.

has anyone used these? theres colors on the test...what i dont get NOW is every color showed up on the strip...pink tan green yellow and orange. does this mean its IS w/e the legend says? below, community, 6.8-7.2...etc?? or does it go by how bright the colors are?? im sorry this may not make a lot of sense, but i know some of you fish heads know what im saying.

This post has been edited by Ficious: Jul 9 2008, 04:48 AM

I started out with strips, and I found them a pain to read. Accuracy aside, the colors never seem to even be the same color as the guide - the ammonia strips I used always had a slight brown tint to it, when it's supposed to be shades of green. I'd suggest the API master kit or similar liquid test - more accurate generally, but they're MUCH easier to read, and while they cost more, you get a lot more tests out of the kit than a box of strips.

Anyway, I did start with the strips. The best thing I've figured is to stand with your back to sunlight or an unshaded clean white light (rather than the "soft white" usually used in lamps - the cheap florescent tubes seem to work best, IME), and then slide the strip along the guide, and try to find the point where it's darker than one shade and lighter than the other, and assume it's equal to the higher one.

With drops, it's about the same method, but if you hold the card with the color guide on it behind the tube, you can get a decent reading under just about any light.

i just tested a second tank of mine and

the ph color matched
nitrates matched
but the nitrite was white, spose to be light pink
and the alkalinity is suppose to be a different color that what it was.



does this mean i either have no nitrites, or i am over the .5 ppm it recommends?
the tank is fairly new with inverts, i couldnt imagine they be high already??

also alkalinity, will someone fill me in on this? its acidity of my water right?
what could the different colors mean?

Test strips suck, i could never get accurate readings from them so bought an API master test kit and get much better readings. If its white instead of a light pink i imagine it means 0.
An alkaline reading means the water is harder, acidtity is softness.

This post has been edited by Geordie: Jul 9 2008, 05:04 PM

White nitrite means 0, that's good. The strips do suck, but in as far as they work, sounds like your getting normal readings. Alkalinity is your kH - it's the capacity for the tank to resist pH change. The normal chemical processes that happen in the water will cause this to drop over time, and when it hits 0, a pH crash may be imminent. Just like nitrate is removed by water changes, kH is replenished by them.

This post has been edited by Corleone: Jul 9 2008, 05:26 PM