its hilarious to read about 45 dead snails where free ammonia was in doubt, tho. im convinced at one point in time there was darn sure some free ammonia heh, sure of it
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if that was my tank Id simply change out all the water and add some motile creatures. not sure if copper will affect them its not common to have copper associated with displays for inverts but your medication plan may allow for that etc not sure on that part
I still think you're reading your salifert ammonia test incorrectly. For salifert nitrite and nitrate, you do lay the test card down on a table and set the vial on top of it and look through the top of the vial to compare the color. For ammonia, you hold the vial up in front of your face with the color card behind it and look through the side. It makes a real difference.
I honestly think the main issue is that a huge percentage of people have off white colored walls, wood flooring, and/or soft white light in the living areas of their home. It's very hard to see anything as crisp white in that environment. Also, ammonia tests are so often on the yellow to brown scale. Slight yellowing of the water in a reef happens to everyone and helps explain why a sample of fresh mix salt or a new setup qt is able to show a hard zero while a mature reef struggles to.the way to use your test correctly after handling reading calibration is not to seek the bottom end zero but any movement down. when you dosed to something above your current number, and it moved down to the current number, that's cycled, even if non saltwater verification shows its zero. reefs cannot hover at .5 day to day there's too much active surface area commanding it as food substrate by the minute.
if you were dealing in seneye numbers, none of this would be happening. its solely a domain for titration, this endless delay. take a sample of your reef water over to a seneye user/minstream user to measure it would be post comparative gold
I know the other samples will read zero, Ive yet to pinpoint why getting bottom end accuracy is so hard in reefing it could be cross reading issues (which dont happen in clean samples) Im not sure
I just know seneye wont agree, and a starting bioload is fine and that measures a cycle in another way/consistently.