How often are you testing?

[ReefJCB]

Ive for a pretty basic apex jr that doesn’t have any probes. With that, I’ve been testing about weekly for nitrate, ph, alk, and salinity. I currently don’t have phosphate, calcium, or mag tests so I’ve been going to my LFS about every month to test.

How often are people testing, I know this is something I can improve on.

 

[sbash]

Really, it depends on what you are keeping in the tank, and if you are having any problems. For example:

pH, once a year maybe? Even then it is just to see if there is a difference at night compared to day time. Most of the time I forget to do the other test.

Salinity, only when I need to acclimate a fish.

Phosphate and Nitrate, only as needed. For example, my I must have hit a critical mass with my SPS tank, as the colours suddenly started to fade. It turns out my Nitrates and Phosphates were completely depleted.

Calcium and Alk, I test every couple weeks, on my tanks with sps (softy and LPS/softy tanks I never test, they are lower volume so water changes are good enough). If I find my parameters are way off, then I'll test daily until I have correctly adjusted dosing.

Magnesium, every couple months, then I do a single dose and that seems fine. lol, although that might be against best practices.

 

[MrObscura]

Alk I've been testing daily because I'm trying to get a doser and all4reef dialed in, which is proving to be pita.

No3, po4 I test weekly before my waterchange. Mostly just because they've been higher than necessary after dirtying up to combat dinos.

Cal and mag I don't test very often. Between water changes and dosing these are in line with Alk so I just go by that.

 

[SPR1968]

If you want to spot potential problems before they become an issue, you really need to get your own test kits and I would recommend weekly testing.

Any longer, and any changes to the water parameters may start to cause problems.

Magnesium is a critical part of the water chemistry as it calcium and alkalinity and need testing to ensure everything is kept in check

 

[Rpc07]

If I am trying to increase or decrease I test that parameter everyday.

For regular maintenance :
Alk & Salinity - every other day
P04 & N03 - once a week
Mag - every 2 weeks

 

[reacclimating 2 the hobby]

Weekly or when something looks off.

 

[iron_mike_gt]

Alk - daily when my bioload changes so I can dial in my dosing; otherwise weekly
Calc / Mag / Phosphates / Nitratres - weekly

 

[Reefahholic]

2x a week or 1x a week when I’m lazy.

 

[Mastiffsrule]

Really, it depends on what you are keeping in the tank, and if you are having any problems. For example:

pH, once a year maybe? Even then it is just to see if there is a difference at night compared to day time. Most of the time I forget to do the other test.

Salinity, only when I need to acclimate a fish.

Phosphate and Nitrate, only as needed. For example, my I must have hit a critical mass with my SPS tank, as the colours suddenly started to fade. It turns out my Nitrates and Phosphates were completely depleted.

Calcium and Alk, I test every couple weeks, on my tanks with sps (softy and LPS/softy tanks I never test, they are lower volume so water changes are good enough). If I find my parameters are way off, then I'll test daily until I have correctly adjusted dosing.

Magnesium, every couple months, then I do a single dose and that seems fine. lol, although that might be against best practices.

Almost my exact schedule. But I should preface this by saying my tank is long established. I look at my coral to tell me how they are doing. I do test salinity anytime I do a water change to make sure it is correct then let the ATO regulate.

I find sometimes testing to much leads to a rush to grab something to dose and never lets the tank settle into a solid ecosystem

 

[Dkeller_nc]

Ive for a pretty basic apex jr that doesn’t have any probes. With that, I’ve been testing about weekly for nitrate, ph, alk, and salinity. I currently don’t have phosphate, calcium, or mag tests so I’ve been going to my LFS about every month to test.

How often are people testing, I know this is something I can improve on.

Hmm. I'm thinking that your Apex Jr. should at least have a temperature probe. And looking through some of Neptune's old documentation, it does seem that the Apex Jr. did not have an BNC connection for a pH probe. However, if you choose to do so, you can actually add this capability with the PM1 module.

I find pH to be a useful parameter to monitor simply to make sure that there's nothing seriously wrong with my equipment. A powerhead or skimmer failure will, for example, result in a noticeably lower pH from insufficient gas exchange. My most recent use of this parameter was when my alkalinity tubing on my DOS came loose from its fitting and was drawing air for a couple of days - the dip in alkalinity caused a lower pH that I was able to correct before major problems occurred.

However, the actual value of pH in an reef aquarium is only weakly important to the health of the overall tank. There are folks with spectacular tanks that go between 8.4 in the day to 8.1 at night, and there are folks running a calcium reactor with spectacular tanks where the high pH mark is about 8.1 and the low's 7.8 or lower.

As you've probably gathered from the responses to the thread, the true answer to the question of optimal frequency of testing, and what to test is "it depends". It depends on what you're trying to keep, how new your tank is, if you're trying to dial in dosing parameters or calcium reactor settings, whether you've added or removed a significant amount of livestock, and even if you've added or removed a significant piece of equipment.

So let's address this systematically. If you're keeping fish only, you probably only need to test the specific gravity once a week or so (presuming you use an ATO), and the only other kit you'll need is a nitrate kit to check the tank once a month or so to ensure that nitrate's not building up to dangerous levels. If you're just starting the cycle on a fish only tank, you might want to add Ammonia to the kits that you have to monitor the cycle.

If you're keeping non-coral inverts and/or soft corals, you'll want to add an alkalinity kit to the refractometer and nitrate kit from above, and test it once a week or so. While the softies don't need the alkalinity and calcium per se, certain popular inverts may require it, both for shell building and maintaining a reasonable pH. You may also want to add a phosphate test to you repertoire, and test for it and nitrates once every two weeks or so simply to avoid issues with overgrowth of algae.

If you're keeping LPS stony corals, you will definitely want to test calcium and alkalinity at least once a week. While most LPS corals are far less sensitive than SPS corals, they still depend on some degree of stability of alkalinity and calcium, and also require certain minimal values of both of these parameters - certainly at least 7 dKH for alkalinity and 380 ppm or greater for calcium. Nitrate, phosphate and magnesium can be tested once every couple of weeks or so, or potentially more often for the NO3 and PO4 if you're fighting an algae outbreak. While magnesium is important for a reef tank with stony coral's health, it is depleted rather slowly. If you perform weekly water changes, it's fairly unlikely that you'll need to supplement it.

If you're keeping SPS corals, particularly acropora, I would recommend all of the above test kits except that you will need a Hanna Checker ULR phosphate kit instead of a "drop type" phosphate kit, and you will likely get little use out of an ammonia test kit beyond initial cycling of the tank. Generally speaking, alkalinity stability with acropora is extremely important; many of us test this parameter every other day, calcium - weekly (simply because it's consumed more slowly), NO3/PO4 & magnesium weekly. At some point, if the tank has been around at least 6 months, growth of corals is stable and therefore alkalinity and calcium consumption is stable and you're the risk taking type, dropping back to testing alkalinity weekly isn't unheard of. But most of us with SPS are a good deal more OCD than that, and continue to test at least a couple of times a week just to be sure.

 

[Chuk]

Weekly, every Friday after work.

 

[JDowns]

Every morning for Alk only takes less than a couple minutes.

Weekly for Calcium, Magnesium, Nitrate, and Phosphate during WC.

 

[crazyfishmom]

pH, alkalinity, calcium and magnesium all get monitored by the apex on a daily basis. I’ve been adding a lot of frags consistently so my demand has changed and I’m trying to keep everything dialed in. This tank is also fairly new so I’ve been closely monitoring nitrate and phosphate but should be able to dial way back on that soon. I find numbers comforting so I test consistently.