APEX Trident Fluctuations without dosing or water change

[mattshell81]

My apex calcium and magnesium seem to be fluctuating a good bit without any dosing. The only thing I have needed to dose is alkalinity and that's spot on to my hanna checker. Calcium is hard for me to reference against another test as my hanna is all over the place and my eyes don't do colors well. I was just wondering if anyone else has had this issue?

 

[blaxsun]

We all have this issue and attribute it to the +/- testing error that the Trident can exhibit.

 

[mattshell81]

We all have this issue and attribute it to the +/- testing error that the Trident can

 

[mattshell81]

We all have this issue and attribute it to the +/- testing error that the Trident can exhibit.

I was just mainly worried about starting automatic dosing with the dos if the numbers were fluctuating by over 30.

 

[SuncrestReef]

The Trident's margin of error is +/-15 ppm for Cal and Mag, and +/-0.05 dHK for Alk. So a fluctuation of 30 is entirely possible within that margin of error.

The way Neptune scales the graphs makes the swing look bigger than it really is. For example, here's my Trident calcium results for the past 30 days graphed in Excel with the scale going from 410 to 450:

But here's that exact same data, scaled from 0 to 450. You can see the calcium is actually well within a stable range:

I've been running Trident Controlled Dosing for 3 years with no problem. At such a small fluctuation in readings, it's barely going to adjust the dosing.