Choosing NO2 checker: URL HI764 vs LR HI767

[Muffin87]

I've been getting a bit anxious about the biofilter of my quarantine tank after a bad ammonia spike.
I remember Dr Tim saying absence of nitrite is a good measure of a biofilter's health. I thought that was actually quite convenient since measuring ammonia accurately is difficult, when you have copper in the water.

If they get stressed they'll start to break up and you will start measuring nitrite, that's the canary in the coalmine. [...] If there's one thing you're gonna measure is measure nitrite on a regular basis and if it starts to appear that tells you there's something wrong with your biofilter. Because these bacteria will always stress first and stop converting nitrite to nitrate. I know a lot of companies wants you to worry about ammonia but it's really the nitrite that tells you way ahead of time that something's have you have a clogged filter you have clogged water path something's wrong with your bio filter and the bacteria are not working well.

I'm having trouble deciding which Hanna Nitrite checker I need, since there are four. Maybe @Randy Holmes-Farley , @Dan_P, @taricha, @Lasse may be able to chime in on this.

Looking at the table below, it seems I need the HI767 Low Range checker.

But what's the purpose of the HI764 Ultra Low Range Checker then?

It's got a smaller range (0-200ppb) than the HI767 LR Checker (0-999 ppb), without increased accuracy (for both it's±10ppb, ±4%).
Is the HI764 Ultra Low Range just a worse or older version of the HI767 Low Range?

Thanks a lot for the help!

P.S. By the way, is 999 ppb NO2-N the equivalent of 3,27 ppm NO2?

 

[Spare time]

Basically everyone is going to tell you it's useless to test. If you had a scenario like Dr Tim's mentioned where nitrite started increasing from that specific bacteria dying off I would be shocked. Just don't worry about it.

 

[Dan_P]

I've been getting a bit anxious about the biofilter of my quarantine tank after a bad ammonia spike.
I remember Dr Tim saying absence of nitrite is a good measure of a biofilter's health. I thought that was actually quite convenient since measuring ammonia accurately is difficult, when you have copper in the water.


I'm having trouble deciding which Hanna Nitrite checker I need, since there are four. Maybe @Randy Holmes-Farley , @Dan_P, @taricha, @Lasse may be able to chime in on this.

Looking at the table below, it seems I need the HI767 Low Range checker.

But what's the purpose of the HI764 Ultra Low Range Checker then?

It's got a smaller range (0-200ppb) than the HI767 LR Checker (0-999 ppb), without increased accuracy (for both it's±10ppb, ±4%).
Is the HI764 Ultra Low Range just a worse or older version of the HI767 Low Range?

Thanks a lot for the help!

P.S. By the way, is 999 ppb NO2-N the equivalent of 3,27 ppm NO2?

Are you thinking of using nitrite as a substitute for testing ammonia?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I agree with the idea to just monitor ammonia.

 

[besskurz]

Don't buy.

 

[Muffin87]

Are you thinking of using nitrite as a substitute for testing ammonia?

Not exactly a replacement.
Just as a way to measure whether the biofilter is working well, or the nitrogen cycle has stalled.

Seems like everyone thinks this is useless tho!

 

[Muffin87]

I agree with the idea to just monitor ammonia.

aren't all ammonia tests affected by copper in the water? How can I tell if I'm measuring ammonia or the copper?

I use it, but I don't like the seachem ammonia badge. The "safe" and the "alert" colours are basically just two slightly different tones of yellow that I can't tell apart.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

aren't all ammonia tests affected by copper in the water? How can I tell if I'm measuring ammonia or the copper?

I use it, but I don't like the seachem ammonia badge. The "safe" and the "alert" colours are basically just two slightly different tones of yellow that I can't tell apart.

What sort of copper are you using?

 

[Muffin87]

What sort of copper are you using?

Coppersafe when I can buy it on amazon US.
Or cupramine (when I ran out of coppersafe).

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I'd stick to the Seachem alert and not try to draw inferences from nitrite which may be totally unrelated to ammonia levels.

Ammonia is not as toxic as many people assume.

How toxic is ammonia, really?

In the context of trying to understand why so many people believe Seachem Prime was useful for them in an elevated ammonia situation, against the data in the link below about Prime potentially doing nothing to free ammonia in seawater, the question arises, why...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[jda]

I just had a recent experience with this - got 4x fish that have C. Irritans from another reefer. I usually do not treat fish with meds, but I decided to with these guys. Huma Trigger that appeared unaffected, queen angel that had visible infection, really cool unknown type of blue damsel that seem OK and a Powder Brown tank that was heavily infested.

In short, the bio filter does die back, rebounds quickly and the Hannah Ammonia is good enough.

I have a QT tank that sits empty most of the time with a Penguin Filter and heater. I do put some ammonium chloride in there from time to time and also some juice from some frozen food.

I usually take out all of the water, replace it and then add the right amount of Coppersafe (like 1.4 ml per gallon, or something). I leave the filter alone.

After adding these fish, the ammonia did go up to about .25 for a few days just with the waste that they had inside of them. I did not feed. On the 3rd day, the ammonia subsided and on the 4th day, I fed but the fish were not all that hungry. On about day 5 or 6, they were acting fine, not hiding and ate voraciously. The next day, ammonia back up to .1, or so. No ammonia since. I did not test the pH, but there was no photosynthetic bump and my home co2 is in the 400s, so it was probably in the low 8s.

The bio filter does die back - do not believe anybody who tells you otherwise, and those people are around. It has always rebounded quickly for me even with 100% water change. If I knew that I was going to be treating the fish, I would have put a sponge in the overflow of one of my displays to get some bacteria growing on it. Placing that sponge in the QT tank filter, or even giving a squeeze for the filter to catch would have helped.

I also do not believe that ammonia is super toxic alone, but I do not want to mix this mini-stress with copper, a sterile QT tank coming off of moving/shipping, etc. Even if it does not kill the fish, it does not help them in the vein of doing chemo with pneumonia. These were captive fish, so I had a head start, but wild fish are stressed enough without ammonia to deal with.

 

[Muffin87]

After adding these fish, the ammonia did go up to about .25 for a few days just with the waste that they had inside of them. I did not feed. On the 3rd day, the ammonia subsided and on the 4th day, I fed but the fish were not all that hungry. On about day 5 or 6, they were acting fine, not hiding and ate voraciously. The next day, ammonia back up to .1, or so. No ammonia since.

Thanks for this.

The ammonia spike in my QT was about 2 ppm, after a week of having a small convict tang in there. I got worried, because my impression was that ammonia was being processed very slowly, if at all.

I've been wondering if I have to oversize the filtration, but from your story, it might be more useful to ensure the QT tank is processing ammonia.

 

[jda]

My guess is that your bio filter had died if it took that long to get going again, or it never fully got going last time. Mine was likely a more typical ramping back up. Hard to know. There are many effective ways to get a tank ready for fish.

This tank of mine did not have fish for probably 9 months. I left the filter running the whole time but did unplug the heater.