How Often Do You Test Your Water?

I dose so i test differently depending if i just added new specimens of sps in. For nitrates and nitrites for example, its monthly, for Ca,Mg,Dkh its weekly, my phospate bi-weekly, PH, is done by my controler every 4 min, and my salinity done weekly too, thats my routine. I change my Phosban and carbon every 3 weeks. I've put as needed because i don't follow a set of weeks but as i said more along the need for it .

 

Im doing PH daily Aquastar controller - leave probe in tank
Temp - just watch my chiller display a few times per day
Nitrate ,PO4 - weekly
Ca, Mg and DKH - weekly
SG - weekly at water change time to make sure everything is reasonably close (new and old water)

Steve

 

Right now, I'm testing almost daily. Over the past several months my Mg dropped to about 1200 from 1400, so I've been having problems keeping my Ca and Alk up to where I want them. I just recently bought more Mg supplement so I now have that where I want it and am testing to get my Ca and Alk up. Besides this, I will normally test bi-weekly to monthly depending on what I'm doing.

 

I generally test weekly, but if parameters are way off… then I will test more frequently until the parameters are stable again.

I have set up an excel spread sheet to track all of the chemicals that I have dosed for the week, and then graph the changes in the respective parameters. This gives me a fairly good gauge of the rate of consumption Ca, Mg, etc…

 

I've been struggling lately to get my chemistry stable, it's been constant adjustments to dosing due to a huge number of factors, huge growth spike which sucked up calcium like crazy then a few problems with the tank which stunted growth a lot and now I'm trying to get back into a rhythm with the tank.
I'm hoping once things stabilize I'll only have to test every week or two.

 

Usually dKh,ca,mag weekly. PO4 every two weeks. No3 rarely now days.

 

We're testing every 3 weeks to month, simply because our tank is established and we know our coral's consumption of all the general stuff. We test our trace elements monthly, but haven't tested nitrite or ammonia in ages simply because there's no concern for those. We test nitrates occassionally, but our fuge plants are dying off because our nitrates are zero (which is good). Our tank gets the same dose of reef supplements at a routine time, and our params have always tested the same when we first got our dosing routine established. For now, we only test occassionally, but instead use the corals to tell us if anything's wrong. If the tank's happy, we're happy. Salinity is tested every water change.