Hanna Colorimetric Checkers for Alk and Ca? F! yes!!
 

http://reefbuilders.com/2010/06/08/h...te/#more-19991

Oh baby. A QUICK test for Ca and Alk? Sign me the frag up.

If they are anything like the Hanna Phosphate Checker, the will be no quicker than Salifert test kits. More accurate maybe, but no quicker.

I expect these Hanna checkers will be most useful for those assays which would otherwise rely on visual judgment of colour gradation eg. for a nitrate test. For a test which can be done through titration-based colour change eg. calcium and alk tests, I don't see the benefit of the the Hanna checkers.

To have alkalinity electronically testable in a hobbyist affordable handheld is a very interesting development, so I must say it's worth of a raised eyebrow. However I wonder how robust it will be. Take for example the probe based nitrate testers .. very fussy and finicky, the probes don't last long and they're brutally expensive to replace - compared to test kits anyhow.

The colorimeters are a little better for robustness but have their own issues. However for a colour comparison based test, a colorimeter certainly takes guesswork out of comparing hues and intensities in potentially variable lighting conditions.

Nevertheless, an interesting development and one worthy of watching out for!!

:nerd:

Yeah maybe I'm missing something here. The nitrate tests have you looking at a bunch of colours and taking a stab at it.

Ca and Alk have definite colour changes so why would we need those?

The checkers might potentially give better precision as most quick and easy calcium tests measure to the nearest 50ppm and alk tests to a precision of 0.5. But I guess we won't know until they release more information.

I use Elos for Calcium and it's good to nearest 10ppm. But yeah Alk is in 0.5 increments.

What do you think of this?

http://www.sensafe.com/pond_products.php

Cheers,
Vic

But to get that precision with the Elos you're supposed to do it in two parts which adds time and more margin for error. Let's see how precise the checkers are. Would be nice to have a quick and easy one step test that is precise down to 10ppm or less.


I actually did contact them once but they have never tested in salt water and do not know if their kits would be accurate or not.

To me the real "dream" of electronic measurement for Ca and Alk would be to add probes to a controller and the controller can measure the gap between what's added and the consumption rates as a function of time. However the technology really just isn't there for alk testing via probe (I did read an interesting article about this a few months ago about how the physics really just wasn't there for a good electronic Alk measurement) and even though the capacity exists for doing this Ca already, it's really more important to track Alk, or at least, without tracking Alk at same time as Ca, then the Ca number doesn't hold a lot of meaning.

So anyhow now that they claim to have figured it out for Alk, I am naturally curious to see how well it will shape up.

If however it is a colorimeter based tester like then realistically it is just a replacement for manual testing and you can ignore controllers from the equation. In which case it has to be about convenience, accuracy and precision. And repeatability. It's already pretty convenient to test Alk, it has to be one of the easiest tests out there, but for Ca is starts to get a little into the weeds and really into the weeds usually for Mg, so one could maybe accept a little loss in the area of Alk for the sake of gains in the areas of Ca and/or Mg in the hopes that overall to test the big 3 becomes easier than the titration based tests for all 3.

I dunno though. I would like to see the products released and then give them a try. The science alone for the Alk is interesting to me so we'll see how they shake out. :)