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mammarudd

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
Dec 1, 2005
Messages
10
Location
Indiana
My bio-spere came in, I added it to my sick and dying fish, and nothing is changing. Its been almost 5 days since I put the stuff in and I havent noticed any big changes in the condition of the water. I use the test strips that show the colors (I know bad, but thats all Walmart sells here)
Heres another question. Does it matter at what level you test the water from? Is it more potent at the bottom of the tank? Im just wondering If Im getting accurate readings.
 
Take a water sample to the lfs that uses a liquid reagent test kit. As you stated, the strips are not accurate. Are you treating the tank with meds?
 
What exactly do the test strips give you? what are the actual numbers? They ARE accurate.. they just don't give a very narrow spectrum to read in... which is why the liquid reagent test are a better choice for more precise accuracy.
 
I have seen members who try to cycle a tank using the strips as measuring devices. They constantly wonder why their Ammonia is still in the dangerous levels after about 6 weeks of cycling. They purchased the AP master test kit and come to find out that their tank is already cycled with 0 Ammonia. Or the Nitrates say they are dangerously high but they actually are 10 or 20 ppm. I have personally compared the Jungle strips to my AP readings and they were not even close. So that's why I say that they are inaccurate.
 
And the biggest reason they can be inaccurate, is that any smidge of humidity or water that gets near them or inside their little storage tube, ruins the entire batch of strips.

Brand new, outta the package, they should be fairly accurate...but it just tends to go downhill from there. And if they spent a lot of time at the LFS before you purchased them, they could already be slightly off just from the chemicals on the strips degrading due to oxidation.
 
well the one time i used the strips i had an AP master kit already and the results were about the same... considering that the test strips didn't have as narrow of a spectrum, they still gave the idea of where you were at.
Malkore- i do see what you mean by how they could become contaminated and i guess that makes sense.

I would not ever suggest using the test strips during a cycle, but i hate when they are discredited as completly innacurate. We use Urine dipsticks at the hospital ER to determine if someone has a like a UTI and it works exactly like the Test strips. However we only use it to get an impression of whats goin on, not an exact number. We dip the urine and get the results, then we send it down to the lab. And you know what the lab uses? They use dipsticks as well!!! Only they put theirs in a machine that gives exact number readouts.

Im just saying, if they are stored correctly they could be used in an established aquarium to determine if there are any abnormalities or not... in conjunction with a reagent test if you think anything is wrong.
 
Ashley is right about the dipsticks...i work in a hospital lab and we do use the dipsticks for urine...you just have to be careful in the way you store them...the machine that reads the dipsticks is not to get the exact numbers only...but also to avoid different people reading them seeing different shades of colors....i used the urine dipstick a couple of times to test the pH of the tank and i got the same reading as the AP test kit...i dont know...never used the ones for fish tanks... :roll:
 
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