Hi Guys,
Thanks for your patience. I had a family emergency that took me away from work for a while last week (my coworkers were responding on RC for me). I’ll do my best to answer all your questions as fully as I can.
Regarding your Certified Standard Kit – You are entirely correct, a 0.2 ppm deviation is unacceptable. If you’ll PM me with your address, I will send you a replacement as soon as I have one. (I’m travelling again at the moment, so I’m not sure what our stock status is right now, please bear with me.)
Regarding the 0.00 readings: It’s puzzling, but possible, to me as well that you would continue to get 0 readings. As I’m sure you’re well aware, there are many organisms, including HA, that absorb PO4 out of the water column, and an active culture can eat it up nearly as fast as it’s added. The amino acids you mentioned adding – I assume it contain PO4? Have you tried taking a sample of water out of your tank, adding this additive, and testing to see if you still get 0?
The most common and abundant form of phosphates is orthophosphate/inorganic phosphate (PO4, P2O5). This is the form detected by photometric methods. While there are other forms of phosphate that can contribute to the total phosphate levels, they are not nearly as abundant, and it is impossible to measure these forms without performing a digestion of the sample. This requires a reactor and an incubator, which are unfortunately pretty cost prohibitive outside of a lab setting. However, failing all else, it may be that the amino acids you are dosing do not contain orthophosphates, but instead contain organic phosphate.
Regarding the “time out†function and the cuvets: The auto time off function was added because it’s an industry standard practice to preserve battery life. I also found the 3 minutes span irritating, and they are working to change it on units now being produced.
Now, while it’s irritating, it doesn’t make the unit dysfunctional. We strive for customer satisfaction, which is we immediately moved to change it once we knew people didn’t like the function. However, we would not be able to stay solvent as a business if we were to take back the thousands of functional units with this feature, which do work as stated in their specifications.
The Certified Standard kit uses two vials because there’s simply no other way to do it. The zero standard is reusable, however, were it to be opened, it would become contaminated. While it would still probably read zero, it would no longer be able to be called certified. I agree that we should have done a better job making it obvious that the 1 ppm standard was NOT reusable – I was shocked when I discovered this as well. I believe that this only applies to the phosphate and iron standards. As it was explained to me by the chemistry department, there was simply no way to make a true phosphate or iron standard that was stable and thus reusable. Once reacted, they degrade very quickly. I will speak to the marketing department on ways to make this information more transparent in our literature and on our website.
i just hope that once the hanna rep comes over that she can provide real answers and not just some text book answers, kinda like when you call dell or some of these other companies , no matter who you talk to they all say the same thing as if we cant tell that they are reading out of there customer service manual. Really what we need is an actual tech or designer not a rep , a rep is only gonna know what they are taught to say or read
Just to defend myself in advance – I have been with Hanna for 5 ½ years, and I really do have a very good technical knowledge of most of our products. I have a double bachelors from Florida Tech in marine biology and aquaculture, a masters in aquaculture from URI, and I worked as the manager of live feed production for Great Bay Aquaculture in NH before coming to work for Hanna. I also had my own reef tank for several years, which was mostly softies, before buying a house and having babies prompted me to dismantle it due to the fact that it was a money pit. ;)
Just checked the vegas water quality report and it doesn't show or they didn't test for po4 levels...:(
There is no way it's .09 maybe I just got a bad meter or some bad regents....
Most municipalities add orthophosphate to the drinking water. It wouldn’t be included in that report because it would be done by the local station, after testing. They add it to the water because it prevents lead pipes (still present in the plumbing of many houses) from corroding and leaching lead into your drinking water.
Regarding questions on the alkalinity tester - like I said, I'm on the road, so I don't know what the latest developments are, but the chemists really did do hundreds and hundreds of tests before releasing the product. We take all these concerns extremely seriously, and the entire chemistry department is working on resolving all issues raised.
Thanks
Jessica
