Phosphate Testing - Hanna vs. Salifert

attilak

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I am very confused here and maybe I am not using the Hanna Phosphate test kit incorrectly! maybe others had run into this situation. I have been having some strange issues, like mushrooms turning white in my reef tank. I did what everyone would probably do is to test all water parameters. I know that my red sea max has always run at high phosphates, but corals seem to do well as it is mainly a softy / LPS tank. I used my hanna phosphate test kit and got a 2.25 reading (ppm), so I retested and got the same reading. I was ready to start dosing slowly with Phosban-L but decided to use the Salifert test kit and to my surprise the results were .25! I don't get it and don't know what is correct here ... I will say that I had some bad experience with my hanna alk test and was always way off so don't even use anymore.

If .25 is correct, then I would not try to lower obviously and that would be an acceptable range for me. But if it is truly more then 2 then perhaps that's why some mushrooms not doing too good. I also don't want to begin dosing something like Phosban-L as it is very potent and can have a negative impact on everything else in the tank.
 

fish farmer

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Do you have the Low Range Phosphate kit? I'm assuming you since I think that one reads that high. I have a low range Hanna Kit and they can be tricky to use, making sure the glass vials are clean, etc. For what it's worth I went back to Salifert since my hanna kit was constantly reading zero, salifert confirmed to low reading
 
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attilak

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Hi, yes I do have both low and high range. They seem to be giving incorrect reading and concerned now that when I used hanna to test my larger tank for phosphates, it showed high and started to dose using Phosban-L and soon all my bubble tip anemones died! so, I think I will sell all my hanna test kits as they are junk IMO, The only one that seems to be correct is the copper one and I use that for my QT.
 

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