Cheap digital salinity tests any good?

[Spare time]

I was just curious if anyone has tried some of those cheap Amazon digital salinity tests before (the pen styles)

 

[T-J]

Get a Hanna checker and a box of calibration packets and you'll be good to go!

Some things just aren't worth trying to save money on.

 

[Spare time]

Get a Hanna checker and a box of calibration packets and you'll be good to go!

Some things just aren't worth trying to save money on.

Yeah I was gonna get the hanna or icecap sometime but I was just curious

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I've not tested them, but there are many decent brands of conductivity meter. I'd get one that reads in mS/cm, not one that makes a conversion to a different unit (like salinity or specific gravity) of unknown accuracy and even definition.

 

[Dennis Cartier]

I have went through so many salinity testers and found most to be unreliable or at least unreliable in my care, lol.

Over the years I have used.

• Manual refractometer
• Milwaukee digital refractometer
• Pinpoint Salinity meter
• Icecap Salinity tester
• Hanna Salinity tester
• Tropic Marin High Precision Hydrometer (2)
• Aqua Media Densimeter (same as TM HP hydrometer)
• Sera Marin Hydrometer
• Thermo Orion Star 3 conductivity meter (with a 4 electrode probe)
• Thermo Scientific 105A+ conductivity meter (with a 4 electrode probe)

I am still using the Thermo 105a+ for daily measurements. When I want to test the calibration and accuracy of the Thermo, I compare it against the TM high precision's, which I did this morning when changing the batteries in the Thermo. The Thermo registered 51.3 ms, which a chart that came with the retired Pinpoint says equals 1.025, and the high precision hydrometer measured it as 1.0249. So good enough for me.

As they say, a man with a watch knows what time it is, but a man with 2 watches is never sure. So I have settled on the TM high precision hydrometers as being the 'correct' standard. That is also why I purchased 2 of them, and then confirmed they match down to the 4th decimal place with each other.

Dennis