Shelf life of a master test kit?

[Jennet27 85]

That seems a very un British thing to do, based on my British immigrant friends here. They have a very different attitude towards distance. I'm 404km from the nearest good store. There's a nice guy across ton with a shop, but he has at most 20 tanks of common Singapore fish in there.

I only do that drive when I visit my kids though. For a REALLY top of the line store, I have to drive for 9 hours and fifteen minutes. This is an out of the way town to live in, though it's pretty.

Well maybe the are just a little more conservative than I am? I learned to drive my (older) friends car down very quiet country lanes that were just up the road from my home in 1969 (age 12), and carried on doing so for many years, as the horses we mostly cared for were sited in various fields out in the countryside. I was not allowed to drive on main roads, just very quiet roads and some more or less dirt tracks.

I have driven long distances, often to see friends I met on holiday or similar from then on, so distance holds no barriers to my way of thinking. Only the cost of the journey and the amount of money available to me at the point of time of the journey would give me pause for thought.

 

[GaryE8 6]

I did 14 hours this summer, but I'm getting old. Past 10 I shouldn't be behind the wheel. My eyes and reflexes get like an expired API test kit.

 

[Jennet27 85]

I did 14 hours this summer, but I'm getting old. Past 10 I shouldn't be behind the wheel. My eyes and reflexes get like an expired API test kit.

I agree. However, due to the limitations of my health conditions, I have to work within them. This can be anything from a half hour rest whenever I feel I need to take one, to making sure I have enough money in my account to enable me to make an overnight stay if I need to. However, I have rarely had to do the later lately.

I have however had a two hour kip in the car whenever I have felt the need, so that has sometimes made it a long day, necessitating me spending the next 4 or 5 days doing hardly anything at all.

Having had to take early retirement from work for health reasons though, this has never really affected the above routine. As a nurse for people with severe learning difficulties and often challenging behaviour, I got used to coping on less than 4 hours of sleep for quite a long time, and then having a couple of days off work so that my body could catch up.

Although for the latter 25 years of my life I spent time going round the service providers we purchased placements at, inspecting their services to ensure they were fit for the often very high payments we were making to them.

 

[gimme30]

Personally I wouldn't bother with the liquid kits. Like Gary I don't test much either, other than for TDS as we can get some wild swings here, but what comes out of my tap is the same now as it was 10 years ago. I've compared and strips are close enough to the API kit that the expense isn't justified.

 

[Back in the fold4 1]

You can have my expired one . I bought it in 2019 and only used it maybe twice to check pH which is still the same 7.8 that it’s been ever since I was a kid in this burg . I wish I had my $ 30 bucks back .