[wesley6610]

Okay, for the last couple of weeks I have been using the Salifert Phosphate kit since I was still seeing cyano bacteria even though I have increased my water flow to 32X, clean out my 125 Gallon protein skimmer twice weekly, 10% water changes weekly and have cut back feeding my fish, corals and inverts to twice a week in small amounts.

Now, I have been mislead from this test kit because it has been saying I have 0.0 ppm Phosphate for the last couple of weeks, but when I just checked my tap water to confirm that my RO/DI water is good, that water came up 0.0 ppm as well.

How can this be? Get 10 mls of water, add 4 drops and mix, add level scoop of stuff and gently mix for 30 seconds, not rocket science right?

[NATIVEVAMAN]

It just might be that you have no phosphates in your tap water,its not unheard of.

[wesley6610]

I would like to hope that is the case, but I have TDS meter on my RO/DI unit and it ranges from 45 - 60 ppm and I assumed that somewhere in there I had phosphates living near Baltimore, MD and all. Well, today I'm going to test out the city tap water here at my GC/MS water quality lab since I'm an environmental chemist and see if I can get a positive result to make sure that my reagents aren't from a bad lot or anything. In your experience, is Salifert kits the best and most accurate on the market?

[wesley6610]

I'm going to go out on a limb and take a sample of my water to my LFS to test for phosphates to confirm that my levels are in fact not zero as my test says. Also, I got in contact with a guy from Salifert and I'm running my batch numbers against their known database to see if similar complaints for those lots have in fact had issues or problems.