Poll on water testing (for ammonia only)

[brandon429]

Bump for more votes n sample from the community

I ran this search: api false ammonia reading


on google and it brings up 450k responses mostly not agreeing for accuracy

then again it’s a mix of fw and marine, and for marine we know nh4/3 interpretations handle a lot of the accuracy questions

why do freshwater folks dislike it pretty much? Upon cursory scan the ratio was not 50/50 good for api in any setting, it was 449,995 bad and five good ones, not joking go check

no I don’t think the search returns given by the all seeing eye are useless you just have to sift for patterns.

 

[brandon429]

MN’s list of mis testing risks affects those readings and accuracy interpretations for sure.

do the instructions give all those settings requirements in the api box?

 

[Clown2020]

Personally I find the Color’s too close togeather on api test kits. With regards to the amonia test kit and false readings I believe at lot of this comes down to misunderstanding of how the test works.

my understanding is that the api test kit raises the ph which causes any nh4 to be converted to nh3 and gives you a reading of the total amonia preent

where as the seachem alert badge and seneye only measure free amonia nh3

i have never had a reading of 0 on the api test kit always 0.25 yet seachem alert badge and seneye measure 0

and if I had 0.25 amonia consistently present for 7 months I don’t think my fish or coral would be doing very well.

That being said this is just my experience and understanding from my own reasearch.

 

[Garf]

Personally I find the Color’s too close togeather on api test kits. With regards to the amonia test kit and false readings I believe at lot of this comes down to misunderstanding of how the test works.

my understanding is that the api test kit raises the ph which causes any nh4 to be converted to nh3 and gives you a reading of the total amonia preent

where as the seachem alert badge and seneye only measure free amonia nh3

i have never had a reading of 0 on the api test kit always 0.25 yet seachem alert badge and seneye measure 0

and if I had 0.25 amonia consistently present for 7 months I don’t think my fish or coral would be doing very well.

That being said this is just my experience and understanding from my own reasearch.

Don’t suppose you’re sticking your finger over the end of the tube to shake the reagents are you?

 

[brandon429]

Warter Parameters help

Just wanted to see what's everyone's opinion is on how these look????

www.reef2reef.com

that one shows a stand out misread, Im going back to see if his vial fill was accurate ish

Im not sure an overfill of 1/16th of an inch can cause the color to go darker, I'd expect it to cause lighter colors, false under reads?

 

[ying yang]

MN’s list of mis testing risks affects those readings and accuracy interpretations for sure.

do the instructions give all those settings requirements in the api box?

These are for the amnonia .

Nitrate more complex as got shake bottle 2 for 30 seconds then add drops then shake for 1 minute .

Directions for all 4 tests in both api freshwater and saltwater are identical

 

[brandon429]

I bet the 5 minute delay is a source of misread errors bigtime, nice relay of instructions.

 

[nereefpat]

I bet the 5 minute delay is a source of misread errors bigtime, nice relay of instructions.

It's pretty clear in the instructions. The back of the card even has it drawn out so that even an illiterate person could perform the test.

Do you use the API ammonia kit?

 

[brandon429]

most of your posts to me are insincere lead up questions, stemming from 2019 beefs I’m not sure the chain of quality is about to be broken.


Post #25 is a fair representation of common misreads, all subjective of course. To me that looks like 1.0 ppm or .1 nh3 which no cycled reef fully stocked and running with a low bioload and huge surface area with coralline rock would ever permit.


I would never use an ammonia test kit for anything in reefing, digital or non digital / for all cycles and for all troubleshoots, that’s why I don’t have an api nearby to reference. In half an hour someone is going to send me a three part pic of their cycling test tubes, thats how api and I do business.


posted api ammonia is an unhelpful distraction in 100% of cycling analyses we do when someone wants a specific start date for their tank. If they don’t mind waiting till March for all three api params to line up, everyone is aware of the open ended wait option.

post #25 is a flat out misread, hundreds more of the same tint are easily searchable.

 

[nereefpat]

I would never use an ammonia test kit for anything in reefing, digital or non digital / for all cycles and for all troubleshoots, that’s why I don’t have an api nearby to reference. In half an hour someone is going to send me a three part pic of their cycling test tubes, thats how api and I do business.

Then why do you have 10 posts in a 2 page thread about the accuracy and interpretation of API ammonia kits?

 

[Garf]

For what it’s worth, I’ve had copepods in 2ppm total ammonia and they seemed ok. Anyone else tested a live food culture with API?

 

[brandon429]

Fish are one of our top gauges of toxicity Im not thinking they’ll be fine even at .5

Pat, your sincerity was very hard to predict. I was not thinking for one instant you were going to relay work patterning you’ve seen relevant to the matter.

 

[brandon429]

Garf in addition to what you typed I had my friend John / cycling friend online / add half a bottle of Dr. Tims ammonia to a five gallon bucket of salt water only and a test snail went on as normal

 

[Clown2020]

Don’t suppose you’re sticking your finger over the end of the tube to shake the reagents are you?

No always the cap provided. i suppose it’s possible im reading the Color wrong as I have always had trouble with the Color charts.

I’ll just stick with my seneye hard to stuff up reading a number

 

[brandon429]

Tank parameters not quite right

Hello all, So I have a 90 gallon reef tank with approx. 30 gallon trigger sump that we recently setup. For the last several months I've kept a log on the tank parameters, and to me, something seems off. Ammonia levels have consistently been elevated, ranging anywhere between 0.1 to 0.5 ppm...

www.reef2reef.com

we didn’t get to see the actual api vials there, but I can produce ten more examples where we did, the point is api is a constant nonstop stumbling block for the masses. Just quick grabbed that example off forum search: api ammonia misreads

 

[brandon429]

@Clown2020

would you mind posting a full tank shot, let us know what your seneye says the reef runs at, then post a pic from api ammonia with its card in the background if you have an api ammonia handy

it’s rare to get seneye + api+ full tank shot benchmark pics. Any ones I’ve seen the api never ever hit yellow zero.

 

[Idech]

I’ve been using API tests for at least 20 years, most of them in freshwater, but only in saltwater for the past year.

I’ve never had 1 single problem. They are a little tricky, but if you follow the instructions to the T and take care of your material, it will work for you.

I really don’t understand what the fuss is about.

 

[brandon429]

@ying yang hey can you post the portion of instructions that tells reef aquarists to regard only the nh3 converted number

I’m trying to find out what aspect of those directions causes nearly every single poster to react to the total ammonia initial read. From the two snippets posted, I can see how they would not know to do that- maybe it’s found in the step down portion of the conversion chart. Non chemists will not understand the sheer need to consider only the nh3 number, curious how urgent this is relayed in the instructions set

 

[Clown2020]

@Clown2020

would you mind posting a full tank shot, let us know what your seneye says the reef runs at, then post a pic from api ammonia with its card in the background if you have an api ammonia handy

it’s rare to get seneye + api+ full tank shot benchmark pics. Any ones I’ve seen the api never ever hit yellow zero.

no worries Here is a near full tank shot taken yesterday (check build thread for more all taken in the past 2 months) seneye reading, seachem badge and api salt water




to clarify for the sake of accuracy seneye will alway read 0.001 which I regard as 0 as it is impossible to compensate even with the trim function as shown below.

I’ve been using API tests for at least 20 years, most of them in freshwater, but only in saltwater for the past year.

I’ve never had 1 single problem. They are a little tricky, but if you follow the instructions to the T and take care of your material, it will work for you.

I really don’t understand what the fuss is about.

and for good measure but slightly off topic a freshwater reading from my 5 year old tank that I breed kribensis in and a pic, I do use and trust the nitrite and nitrate tests for freshwater.




At the end of the day we can use what ever test kit we have the most confidence in, a hobbby grade kit will never be as good as a lab test.

In my experience, research and personal opinion the seneye and seachem badge validate each other’s result, so Looking at the results objectively the api test is the one with the most variance across multiple tanks and therfore a test kit I would not use given the choice

 

[brandon429]

Passing api scores there, yellow close enough. youve got a heck of a set of tanks and testers, I’d say the gamut is covered