Dear Matt,I can make you a batch of 4 KH next week if needed. For measuring KH, double the volume and count drops. Ie 9 drops in 10 ml = 4.5.
Sent from my iPhone On Jan 13, 2010, at 13:33, Matt Staroscik <matt@wrongcrowd.com> wrote:
I just installed mine but I think it is not working properly and I wanted another opinion. Obviously they are very simple and there is not much to go wrong, but I think my 4 dKH standard solution is bad. I have the Red Sea model, by the way, which comes with indicator, but no standard solution. They tell you to use tank water, which I don't want to do as the tank is 6dKH and has an unknown amount of phosphates etc in it.I made the 4 dKH standard myself with baking soda, RO/DI water and a seriesof dilutions. A KH test kit verified that it is correct, but as I usedkitchen glassware maybe there was enough residue from detergent to mess things up. My RO/DO filter shows 0-1 ppm TDS as it should, so it is stillworking well... but maybe not well enough for this.When I added the indicator to the solution, it immediately turned green, about the shade of green that you want to see when the CO2 in the aquariumis at the right level. For a sample of the reference that has not had CO2 addedto it, the solution should be blue, right?In the tank, the solution in the drop checker stubbornly stays green, evenafter the overnight lights-out.I put a sample of the solution + indicator into a graduated cylinder to see if it was sensitive to pH changes at all. If I blow in to it with a straw, the CO2 in my breath turns in yellow, as expected. Shaking it to drive off CO2 got it down to blue. The strange thing is, it stayed blue overnight. If the solution was off I would have expected it to bounce back to green whenleft alone.Some forum posts have said that drop checkers may not work right until they have broken in for a week or so, but that just doesn't sound right to me.Does anyone have ideas, and/or a convenient source of good 4 dKH reference solution? It's easy to make, but maybe not easy enough to make one that'spure enough in a kitchen. Thanks, MS _______________________________________________ GSAS-Member mailing list GSAS-Member@thekrib.com http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/gsas-member
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