I thought we would share some pics that we took while playing with the kit here.

Here is a snap shot of the phosphate kit:

http://reefwholesale.com/gallery/mai...serialNumber=4

And the contents of the box

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These things are crazy easy to use.
This is how it works.
The kit comes with 2 glass vials. One is the reference the other you add the reagent too and test for phosphates.
fill both vials with ml of water.
Add reagent to one of the vials and shake for 2 min

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Press the power button until the tester show the above image.

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Place the vial of just tank water in the checker, press the button and close the lid.
The checker will flash with dashes while it calibrates.

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When you get the msg above you are ready to add the second vial containing the reagent into the checker and close the lid.

The Hanna checker will turn off after 2 min of standing idle, so mixing this vial at the start is easier than trying to mix at this step.

http://reefwholesale.com/gallery/mai...serialNumber=4

Hold the button for a few second until this timer starts to count down.

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Unfortunately for this test our water quality in our sps system is impeccable so its not a very dramatic result but a good one none the less.

Zero phosphates even with heavy fish bio load on this system. Big thanks to the Fauna Marin Ultra Phos, Two Little Fishies carbon, giant skimmer and weekly water changes with Royal Nature salt :)

http://reefwholesale.com/gallery/mai...serialNumber=3

We did have some detectable phosphates in our LPS system. Not bad though considering we only do 50g weekly water changes and the LPS are currently being quite heavily fed with the Fauna Marin LPS food.

I think I will add a TLF 550 reactor tonight and some phosban media :)

As I do not have a salinity probe on my system I have often wonder if what I am reading on my Chinese made refractometer is actually accurate. I find that the line on these units that indicated the specific gravity to be a bit fuzzy and what one person reads as 1.025, another could easily read as 1.026.

I do check the calibration of my refract weekly with the Fauna Marin Reference Solution but none the less a digital read out is a definitive value that is more easily repeated on each test.

So when I got the Hanna Digital Refractometer I just had to open it up and give it a test to see how close or how far off my testing really was.

http://reefwholesale.com/gallery/mai...serialNumber=4

I opened up the box and I was pretty impressed by how the unit looks.

I must admit that I handed the instructions over to Trina right away and instead felt the need to start pressing random buttons to see what happened :)

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Here is a diff view with the unit in a position so that we can get to the good part and test some water!

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After I had my fill of pressing buttons for the sake of pressing buttons, I stopped messing about and listened to Trina and what we were actually supposed to do with the unit.

So press the ON/OFF button and the screen will display the message above.

http://reefwholesale.com/gallery/mai...serialNumber=4

We used a pipette for the test, and as per the instructions covered the prism with water from our 144g half cylinder display tank.

http://reefwholesale.com/gallery/mai...serialNumber=4

Here is a picture with the prism surface covered with our water sample.

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We pressed the read button and the unit almost instantly produce this value on the screen. As I was expecting a specific gravity value such as 1.025-1.026 to appear and as I had just tested the Hanna check and it counted down, I stood there for a few second half expecting the 34 to count down to zero and yield me a result :)
Then I realised that it was actually displaying Practical Salinity Units (PSU) and the machine had produced said value WAY faster than I had anticipated!

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Now if you press the Range button on the right side the screen will briefly display the measurement units (in this case ppt).

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Then it will change to the value and remain there.

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Now to change to the value that I was first expecting,

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And we are got exactly what I was hoping to see!

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Here you can see what happens when we cycle back to the original screen of PSU

So to sum it up, the Hanna Digital Refractometer was crazy easy to use and getting results from this unit were almost instantaneous.

Very happy with the ease of use and quality of this unit.