Hi Pete
Ehsan thanks for your replies.
I hope you don't feel that my points were too critical because thats not how they were meant. I think you offer an honest and unique service which is extremely useful. But I think that since you are currently the only company to offer this at a practical price, you are vulnerable to be blamed for the limitations of the technique, since theres no one else to compare you to. Its not possible to say 'all the companies have this particular limitation in their testing'. And when I say limitation I fully appreciate your comment that the real variation of say Cd is only a very small amount, IE 0.5 ppm, but I think the problem is that users hope to know exactly what the possible error margins are, since they are often interested in these very small differences - frequently thats what draws them to do a triton test, to determine things below the detection limit of their other tests.
sorry pete I have not 100% understand that point.
Cadmium is just 0.5 ppb out thats 0.0005 ppm .
When you say that the article in question is manipulative, I partly know what you mean - it might be a bit sensationalist, so to speak. But I think thats to be expected since you stand out as the highest authority as far as testing goes for ordinary hobbyists, and the authors did turn up a worrying result. You are always going to be under scrutiny since everyone holds triton testing up as always correct. IE if someones home test kit reads a different value to their trition test, they will immediately say the triton test is correct, and often they will come on forums and let everyone know about that. So if the triton test then turns out to have flaws which have not been disclosed, everyone is disappointed. Having said that though I think the evidence currently is that the article confirmed that the triton test IS indeed always better than the home tests, with the small caveat that some elements are not quite as accurate as everyone thought. Or perhaps its just that at close to the limit of detection, some greater deviances creep in.
Well thats sound valid to me, but if you could write a bit simpler I would realy happy.
Regardless though I do believe you need to explain this so no one is surprised. IE make sure that you say what the potential errors are and of what magnitude. Then, if an article like the one in question is published, you can point to your documentation and say 'we have already disclosed and explained this'.
Based on what you all know now and what I and this article say , that ICP-OES testing of seawater is very difficult, the problem we have here is, a real and proffesional assessment of the accuracy will also be very difficult.
Wich here seems to be underestimated.
Even for just our Display Tank we would need to use " standard addition" in a lot of variations and, Test in between of a lot of different other aquarium tests , possible Memory effects, the transport and possible holding times aswell as the robustness of the method need to be taken into acount.
We work on that for a long time now to find the real meaningful assessment by our self, for our customers.
But something like that take time and a lot of practical testing , i think you can imagine.
So we will come up with a PDF that will help the users with this point. It interference to the Measurment line , the real deviation in different amounts, and the worse case recovery will be in there, also wich elements are problematic with holding times and " glueness " to the container walls and other special behavior of atoms like Iodine and acid will be in there.
Parcialy from time to tim eI tried already to put some of the inf here like the interference of I to P, or some deviations.
Regarding the hamburger, I understand your feeling but I slightly disagree. Lets say we are interested in the pesticides in the hamburger. It might taste good but we want to know if its got anything poisonous in it. With triton testing, we might have a problem in the tank, and want to know why it might happen. We might jump on the high Cd, since its so toxic, and say 'there is our problem'. When in fact the Cd is 5 times lower than we expected and that factor of 5 might be significant, so we might blame the high apparent Cd and not fix the real problem in the tank.
I can not follow the hamburger I think there is a missunderstandment in here. I wanted to say if you want to assess a purpose of something, the best way is to use it for the purpose. But in here that has not happened.
Having said that, as far as the 'fit for purpose' question goes, there was never any question for me that triton testing is fit for purpose. Its clearly more accurate than home test kits, so its clearly a vast improvement. Thats its purpose. It might however not be fit for the purpose of scientific research of, for instance, iron depletion in an aquarium. Since I have been recently interested in iron, this is something I was interested in triton testing for. A quick look at triton test results shows iron below 0.01 ppm in many tanks, when the iron might actually be higher as we discussed (But you already said you would address that which is great). But is triton testing suitable to determine if iron is getting to limiting concentrations in tanks? No, as its not sensitive enough. But triton is fit to greatly improve peoples understanding of whats in their tanks, which I see as its purpose.
I agree pete thats it , we even write that in the ECS as we can not test IRON down to the NSW levels we just are able to find it if it is already to much... so if you add Iron in that case like Randy or Me and a lot of others, you better stop as you overdosing. Thats the information you get out of Iron in the case of TRITON Testing. And that is its purpose. It will make your dosing Transparent for overdose but will not get Iron into NSW level. We don´t hide that.
In a lot of cases the Qualitativ analysis would be even enough, so no accuracy at all would be helpfull already for our purpose.
As far as the trust issue goes, I guess from the bold type you might feel offended by the suggestion that users need independent testing to trust triton. I would like to point out that independent testing is normal in most aspects of goods today, with regards to food, drink, consumer goods, etc, including tank equipment etc. Independent verification of quality is ubiquitous in todays market place, taking aquarium goods, people are using triton to test aquarium salts for instance. And recently a salt was shown to have a quality control issue which was caught by triton via a hobbyist. As a result the issue was fixed and potentially tank crashes were avoided. If people had not tested the water, perhaps they would have found out the problem in the end, but it might have been through tank crashes. Testing attempts to avoid that. Independent testing also increases confidence in services like yours and I really think you should welcome it. If you try to prevent independent testing, it makes triton look like they have something to hide, which I don't believe you do.
You are right but that is not a easy point... I don´t feel offended at all people should know what the get for there money I am fine with that... and they can send in what they want if it helps them to feel more confident with it... The trust and knowledge part you also might be misunderstanded ( I know it is difficult I am a very poor writer ).
I prefer to know things on my own, like a lot of my customers, we don´t like to trust our succsess to sombody else.We try to promote this kind of reefing. That is a core of our Products, if you have a close look you will see. I don´t want you to trust me and you don´t need to. If you want to ask me how you can assess your own tank Matrix in terms of how accurate it will be for the elements of concern, ask me and I will tell you.
This would be real knowledge everything else is trust.
And then we will end up in I trust Monti energy or Blue Colors powder... or the guys hwo assessed TRITON testing is perfect.... thats not TRITONs goal.
BTW for me, the articles reported issues with triton do not worry me much, as long as I know the results (which elements I should be wary of trusting tritons figures for). I was more worried and surprised when I read about the fact that triton do not welcome independent testing, and are so closed with respect to information about their techniques. I appreciate that some information has to remain yours for commercial reasons but I would like so see everything else disclosed. IE whatever is not commercially sensitive. The less that is disclosed, the more important independent testing is IMO, because if you don't say how you are testing, no one else can judge your methods reliability. A process that is not disclosed or independently tested is of far less use than one that has been proven to accurate and reliable.
Best regards, Pete
As you can see professional indipendent testing/certification/acreditation is a very difficult and costy issue, we have tried to overgo that kind of proof to keep the price of the Testing low and be able to use also unconventionall methods easier and faster. have in mind that by a certification/acreditation the results wouldn´t get better, you would possibly just trust in them more.
I mean that is what it is all about if you would like to pay more for the same , just because sombody tells you it is good, that is your descision, there are acredited Labs all over the world.... and normaly they don´t have reeftanks.
But let us stay on Focused on the results and the questions, not on other possibilitys for now.
I will start to answer the first question of the breakdown soon.
All the best Ehsan
