What kind of chemistry test should I get for a freshwater aquarium?

What kind of chemistry test should I get for a freshwater aquarium?

The TL;DR is this: Dry tab test kits (the strips) are fine to answer a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ ammonia, nitrite, and ‘high or low’ pH or nitrate. This is good enough to dictate ‘evasive action’ like waterchanges or bioseeding.

Sometimes it’s really important to know what the pH level is, in a freshwater aquarium. And sometimes it’s important to know about nitrogen equilibrium. In other words, are fish wastes being broken down appropriately in an environment by the balance of: Aeration, water-chemistry, and bacteria?

So, these tests are available to the hobbyist. And regardless of the test that you buy, I recommend that you have at least those tests: nitrogen (Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrate) and pH. You can take it to the next level and use test for alkalinity and calcium. Oxygen and salinity can also be tested, but the need for that is much less common.

It has been incorrectly asserted that water test kits that depend on DRY TEST STRIPS are worthless and nothing could be further from the truth. Some hobbies prefer to use liquid chemicals for the tests. And they’re right in that, those liquid-reagent tests are more accurate.

But I have an important point to make in this article:

Aquarium-water dry-test strips are as accurate as a smoke detector.

I’ll say that again: Water dry-test strips are as accurate as a smoke detector and that’s all they need to be.

For the average hobby, trying to do well with their fish, all you need to know is:

1. Yes or No: There is an ammonia accumulation.
2. All you need to know is that your nitrates are “high”.
3. All you need to know is whether or not your pH is acidic, or alkaline. Something other than neutral.

And water test strips are absolutely adequate for that. YOU DO NOT USUALLY NEED NUMBERS!

Just like a smoke detector, it doesn’t really need to tell you how severe the fire is. You only need to know that there is a fire.

So a water test strip is as accurate as a smoke detector and that is all it needs to be.

So when people tell you to “throw those away”, they should be pushed for an answer to the question: “When all the treatments are basically the same for high ammonia, what difference does it make? Whether you know how high it is?”

1. You still need to do water changes,
2. You still need to Bioseed.
3. You still need to reduce feedings.
4. You still need to make sure the pH isn’t too high.
5. And you need to increase aeration.

If you know that your pH is outside the range that your type of fish are comfortable in, for example, Molly and guppies, and African cichlids have a tendency to prefer a slightly higher pH, while tetras and South American cichlids tend to prefer a lower pH, is there really any difference? Once you know your pH is too high or too low, there is a buffer to correct that. This simplifies many things. I tend to recommend Seachem Neutral Regulator for pH issues with most community tank fish. Is a little bit high for South American tetras, and it’s a little bit low for guppies, but it is a happy, and successful compromise for both.

The most important aspect of water test strips, versus chemicals test, is that customers will do them, and they will do them frequently, and they will do them practically without error.

You would not believe how many times I have heard of people running the chemical tests incorrectly. Not even realizing that that “second bottle of reagent” isn’t just extra. It’s the other half of the test.

Test strips are simple. And they give you basic action items which can make you successful.

I would retract that advice, if you were doing tests of the efficiency of certain things where you absolutely needed to know the degree of ammonia reduction by a particular product. Where you would need to be able to pinpoint things along the gradient or spectrum.

90% of hobbies do not need that precision, and so they should not be recommended to buy a test that is often too complicated to consider necessary or worthwhile.

With regards to test strips, while they seem very easy to read and run, please note whether or not the manufacturer wants you to shake off the excess water or not. Also, please heed the instructions about how long you should wait to read the results, because for some of the tests, the result ends up being the same color after several minutes. That could confound your efforts to provide better water for your fish.

So, I am a big fan of test strips because they are at least as accurate as a smoke detector, and as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to know how big the fire is, because when reacting ‘positive’ it calls up specific action items and that’s good enough. But I recommend that you not underestimate the importance of following the test strip’s instructions fairly specifically to get the best result you can.