hanna handheld colorimeter (phosphate and alk)

Phosphorus Checker HC Handheld Colorimeter, HI 736| Hanna Instruments

Checker®HC Handheld Colorimeter - Alkalinity, HI 755 | HANNA Instruments

we picked these up at MACNA this year and love it;D These meters IMO are super easy to use and are very accurate (alk down to decimal point!)

The phosphate takes about 4 minutes to run and the alk takes only a minute or two.

As many know phosphate levels are very hard to test for and the only way to get an accurate reading is to use a colorometer. My first reading came back at 90 in our SPS tank (we slacked way too much in our water changes and changing our phosphate reactors) Did a water change and switched out all our phosgaurd, chemi-pure and purigen and now the phosphates tested at zero today. Took a matter of days to turn our corals brown and will take months to color back up again: due to our lack of maintance. So now with this meter we can keep up with the levels more closely to prevent this from happening again

The meter that I find the most useful is the alk colorimeter. While it is not difficult to do the liquid test depending on your lighting or ability to see color change might mean a big difference in your percieved levels. Our tank will literally go through alk so very fast that we are having to test/dose daily on a new schedule. Our ca and mg are stable however it is nothing for our alk to drop from 9 to 6 in one day (we have a heavily stocked sps tank that is growing like weeds right now) I like to keep the alk at 11 so that is way too low. So now with this meter i can get to the most accurate reading that will help calculate my dosing schedule.

I would highly recommend any SPS keeper consider purchasing these 2 meters

 

Congrats on the pick ups and thanks for the write up

 

great adds Schachmel

90 ppb - what was your previous test kit for phosphates and what result did you get from that?

on a Salifert kit that measure in ppm your result would be 0.09

Steve

 

Nice write up, I really like the Hanna phosphorous checker. I've been using it for a while, it seems quite good compared to other phosphate test kits. Definitely trust the results more.

 

actually never tested it myself....bought an API testkit and it was never accurate.....if you had a phosphate reading then your level was always much much higher. I knew the phosphates had crept up a because all of our blue and green corals started to turn a nasty brown color and was getting a lot more algea on the glass.

The other thing was I was using Phosgaurd and I didnt change it out when i should have, which just meant I allowed it all to leach back in to the water. Plus our membranes on our RO/DI needed to be changed out so we were probably leaching it out from there!

 

I need to get these and any other digital meters that are on the market. At that age where sight is being a factor lol. Not to mention the light testing under.