Test Strips

[moochy13]

i was round a friends today helping him out with his tank, and i took my API kit with me to test his water as he'd not used one before. we done all the tests with my kit on his tank water and on his tap water. then out of interest we tested his tank and tap with his Tetra test strips. all the results of the strips were near enough to my API kit to say there wasnt really any difference in accuracy. the only noticable difference was a 0.4 difference in pH reading, the strips reading higher than the liquid kit. i have also done the same comparison at another friends house using his API test strips, and again, the results were good enough that i would be happy to use them for my tank.

everybody on here is very very quick to tell everybody to totally disregard test strips (unless maybe your tank has been running a year and you use them just to check) yet fom my 2 side by side tests using different brands of strips i cannot honestly say i wouldnt suggest using them. i would always reccommend the liquid kit just because i'd have a bit more confidence in it and its better value, but id have no trouble using strips. and lets not forget strips usually test water hardness aswell, which our API kits dont.

so has anybody else recently done a side by side test, or do you all just take it as gospel that they're a waste of time ?

 

[Uriel]

The problem here is i would assume your friends tank was 0 for ammonia and nitrite. Unless you did a set of tests that ran through the spectrum of results from 0-160 ppm for example it's hard to tell if they would differ. TBH i've spoke with enough people and read enough stories here where people are registering 0 on ammonia and nitrite on strips and there fish are ill and don't know why and then tested with liquid test and got a higher result that i wouldn't trust them.

Also i would assume that as all the reagents are present in the strips that they would degrade with exposure to moisture and air.

Even the liquid test kits aren't an absolute and there is difference in results from different liquid test kits and even the posibility of different people doing the test more or less accurately.