phosphates

[tanksman]

I recently posted a thread called seen green,and I took some of the suggestion that you guys posted I went and bought a API phosphate test kit and I tested my aquarium water and found that it had 0.5 ppm so I decided to do a water change this morningI don't know if this is normal but the saltwater mix is cloudy so I decided to check it also it came back with 0.25 and I thought that maybe the salt was bad. so I decided to check the RO water it also came back 0.25 the RO unit has all new filters and it even has a pre filter and my total dissolved solids is 0 anybody have any ideas or suggestions

 

[riksreef]

i would suggest either ELOS or Red Sea, very accurate

 

[jservedio]

+1 on getting rid of API tests - they are awful. ELOS and Red Sea are very accurate. I use Salifert just because they were a bit cheaper and basically just as accurate. With any of the test kits beside API, not only will they be accurate, but you will get a much higher sensitivity. I don't test for phosphate much anymore, but I test nitrate maybe once a month and the Salifert Nitrate test gets down to 0.2ppm - that's 25x more sensitive than the API kit to give you an idea how terrible API is.

 

[jmann124]

To get a more accurate nitrate reading from API, take the ppm color value and divide it by 4.4. Example: 40ppm is actually 9.09ppm. It sucks not knowing this but that will get you a more accurate API reading on nitrates.

 

[tanksman]

what about Hannah Digital checkers are they any good