Bad Salifert Ammonia Test Kit

I put together my 45G cube reef tank last weekend, filled it with RO/DI, 60 lbs of BRS reef saver rock, a bottle of Dr. Tims One and Only, and 2 ppm (60 drops for total water volume) of Ammonium Chloride. When I received the ammonium chloride direct from Dr. Tim's it had leaked during shipment so I was skeptical. Thus, when the water read 0PPM of ammonia with a Salifert test kit the next morning, I figured it had probably been a bad bottle for one reason or another.

Accordingly, I added a few chunks of dead fish to cycle the old fashioned way. The next day, I checked my ammonia again with the salifert kit. The water smelled bad, so I was starting to suspect something was wrong with the kit. I waited one more day, still reading zero, so today I went to the LFS and picked up a tried and true API kit that read 2PPM. My nitrite is also at about .4PPM and my nitrate is at >25PPM. Going to be a lot of fun getting it back to where it is ready to introduce livestock....

Anyway, below is a picture of the two test kits. I have been keeping reef tanks for years and am certain that I'm performing the steps of the test kit correctly.

Could have been a very expensive mistake for someone new to the hobby - and one that could have killed quite a few fish.

 

By the way - in the picture the API looks lighter than it is. Matches 2PPM perfectly.

 

It's not uncommon (or even rare, unfortunately) to get a bad kit under any name. Overall, however, the Salifert is usually more accurate than API.

It's also not uncommon to not have detectable Ammonia when using Dr. Tim's One and Only bacterial supplement. OTOH, the foul odor is a sure sign (the smell was how we determined if a tank was ready before reliable test kits were available).

BTW, having used Dr. Tim's, your cycle should still complete a bit faster.

 

Very odd to me that a chemical company would produce a bad batch of reagent.

Must employ very low quality control measures. I've owned probably 50 test kits in my life and never had a bad one. I typically use Elos, API, and Hannah checker (with multiple of each for redundancy)