Cycling questions

[brandon429]

agreed everyone has their own way. I arrive at this from doing cycle jobs in other people's tanks and from reading posts from Randy/the top reef chemist from any site, like this one:

 

[Garf]

Wow, I never knew color chart tests could be that unreliable…. Hmmm, Hanna checkers could be the way to go instead and just keep the other tests to compare my results. Also it seems a lot of people take nitrite and nitrate into consideration. Considering a lot of YouTube channels always fixate on numbers and I get most of my information from brs. Maybe I should step back and continue to get my information from reef2reef.

It’s probably not the test kits , so much as old eyes, lol. I use a Hanna checker but with API reagents (converted by a calibration slope), works great for phosphate and nitrate.

I see. I’ll take your information and Brandon’s then change my perspective of reefing. Moving forward I’ll still seed the tank and continue with my livestock plan. The only thing I won’t be doing is testing for nitrate and nitrite until it’s been 60 days of feeding. Then check to see if anything has changed majorly. Also move away from using api test kits for now on.

Do you guys know of any good digital checkers for nitrite and nitrate levels? Possibly for all parameters.

your current API nitrite is all you need. I’ve tried spiking samples to get false readings, I failed. Even the nitrate is OK.