Yes hakari is good ,PE is very good too.Thank you for the detailed response! I'm going to stew on this for a day or two, and more importantly not try and respond at a very late hour when I should be asleep. lol. This is all great information and I appreciate it! More once I've digested, pun intended.
One quick question, I am using Hakari Marine-S, hopefully that qualifies as a "quality" pellet food?
As a quick update tonight, I got some new toys today! Sometimes I feel like I have fallen so far, getting excited about more accurate testing kits, but hey, we are all nerds somehow. Water parameters are as follows:
API:
pH – 8.4 ppm
Ammonia – 0 ppm
Nitrite – 0.5 ppm
Nitrate – 0 ppm
Phosphate – 0.25 ppm
NYOS:
Nitrate – 5-12 ppm
Phosphate – 0.2-0.3 ppm
Everything is looking pretty good. I love the discrepancy between the two Nitrate tests, so I will probably keep running both for a while to see if they are consistently inaccurate. It is *slightly* frustrating that my fancy new kit only narrowed me down to between two colors, but I am much happier with the results. Here is a quick update shot, nothing has changed recently. Oh, except our fire shrimp molted again today. That’s twice in 10 days since he was added, but he seems happy! A brief R2R search seemed to indicate that wasn’t an unheard rate of molting, and like everything else, there is no consensus on why the rates of molting can vary. Cheers!