Seneye Experiments and Cycling

[NeonRabbit221B]

14 Day Testing Checkup on the large rock setup. (15 days left on slide)
Starting ammonia reading was .105 on 7/26. Going to ignore pH from Seneye as I just don't trust but it was posted above...
Looking through the data it was a steady decline until 8/3 at 6 PM when it jumped from .077 to .138 which was odd... By 8/5 at at 9 PM it had declined to .127 and then at 11 pm it dropped swiftly to .073. Not entirely sure what happened but I did find a fly and do top off the tank every few days but I havn't logged the days/times on top offs to see what I was doing that day... Either pH/ammonia or flow changed but seneye shows a fairly constant pH...

Seneye Eye Reading today 8/6 at 4:30 PM was .034.
Salinity 1.023
Temp 78.8
API Ammonia .25-.5 but closer to .5
Salifert Ammonia... .15 (caveat here is the box it came in says NH3 profi test and reagent is listed as NH3 but instructions say it is measuring Total ammonia... amazon reviews indicate something is screwy)
Red Sea Nitrite 1.5
API pH 8.1-8.2

Dosed .5 ppm and when I have 5 days left I will do a final dose and before and after testing.

 

[Dan_P]

14 Day Testing Checkup on the large rock setup. (15 days left on slide)
Starting ammonia reading was .105 on 7/26. Going to ignore pH from Seneye as I just don't trust but it was posted above...
Looking through the data it was a steady decline until 8/3 at 6 PM when it jumped from .077 to .138 which was odd... By 8/5 at at 9 PM it had declined to .127 and then at 11 pm it dropped swiftly to .073. Not entirely sure what happened but I did find a fly and do top off the tank every few days but I havn't logged the days/times on top offs to see what I was doing that day... Either pH/ammonia or flow changed but seneye shows a fairly constant pH...

Seneye Eye Reading today 8/6 at 4:30 PM was .34.
Salinity 1.023
Temp 78.8
API Ammonia .25-.5 but closer to .5
Salifert Ammonia... .15 (caveat here is the box it came in says NH3 profi test and reagent is listed as NH3 but instructions say it is measuring Total ammonia... amazon reviews indicate something is screwy)
Red Sea Nitrite 1.5
API pH 8.1-8.2

Dosed .5 ppm and when I have 5 days left I will do a final dose and before and after testing.

I agree that flow and pH are the big levers that could have changed the Seneye ammonia reading.

The Seneye reading of 0.34 ppm gives a total ammonia much higher than API total ammonia. If we assume 10% free ammonia, a 0.5 ppm total ammonia should be 0.05 ppm free ammonia, not 0.34 to the Seneye. A 0.34 ppm free ammonia is more like 3.4 ppm total ammonia. I would not expect a functional API test to be that far off.

Maybe I am missing something.

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

I agree that flow and pH are the big levers that could have changed the Seneye ammonia reading.

The Seneye reading of 0.34 ppm gives a total ammonia much higher than API total ammonia. If we assume 10% free ammonia, a 0.5 ppm total ammonia should be 0.05 ppm free ammonia, not 0.34 to the Seneye. A 0.34 ppm free ammonia is more like 3.4 ppm total ammonia. I would not expect a functional API test to be that far off.

Maybe I am missing something.

Derp... Must have missed a key. It was .034

 

[Dan_P]

Derp... Must have missed a key. It was .034

Phew!

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

After adding the .5 ppm ammonia the device is reading .067. Based on my calibration data it was placing that around .75 total. I honestly don't know how much concern I will have with tracking total ammonia given that pH is a massive factor... Still worried about that unexplained spike I had for 2 days that suddenly disappeared.

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

Part A complete. Using larger diameter rock pieces at 2 lbs per gallon the initial 1.5 ppm reduction took about 15 days. After repeating dosing the 2nd 2 ppm processes in about 2 days, the 3rd dose in a little more than a day then the 4th dose in 18.5 hours with the final dose being processed in just under 14 hours.

Date and Time	Ammonia Reading	Event
7/26 6:30 PM	0.119	Final dose up to 1.5
8/10 11 AM	0	All ammonia processes (352.5 hours)
8/10 6 PM	0.086	Dosed 2 ppm and found that pH was low so raised ph
8/10 11:30 PM	0.131	Raised pH to 8.15
8/12 2 PM	0	Full 2 ppm processed in 44 hours
8/12 5:30 PM	0.087	Dosed 2 ppm
8/13 8 PM	0	Processed 2 ppm confirmed 0 API 26.5 hr
8/13 11:15 PM	0.066	Dosed 2 ppm
8/14/2021 6:37:00 PM	0	Full processed. Confirmed 0 API ~18.5 hr
8/14 7:40 PM		Dosed 2 ppm ammonia
8/15/2021 9:30:00 AM	0	Full Processed

For Part B I will repeat the dosing regiment (1.5 ppm until processed then 4 additional doses of 2 ppm) but using rock chunks under 4" at 1 lb per gallon. The goal is to see if NSA scapes can dry cycle faster and nitrify ammonia with less poundage of rock.

 

[Dan_P]

I got a seneye a few months back and accidentally over ordered some slides thinking they were expired... Long story short I have a ton of live rock, a fairly useless piece of equipment and a bad case of a desire to put some numbers behind cycling and experiment with some variables to determine how tanks process ammonia. I don't think cycling is a big deal but seeing thread after thread of new reefers being told "you have to wait for nitrites to drop to zero or fish will die" is a driving force behind these tests.

For the first two months I let it sit in my tank, got some par readings and just observed. I did a test at one point dosing into my sump which I removed via a water change and was impressed with it enough to do some digging. @brandon429 (you may have seen him replying to a new reefer that his tank is cycled and posting links) asked me to perform my first experiment which was evaluating if it is possible to cycle a tank using dry rock and no bacteria in under a month. You can read about it on page 5 and 6 on this thread

Sustained Ammonia spikes are misreads

Neon wow you packed a lot of observation into this experiment. I thank you heartily and can’t wait for updates ! I did not know that nitrite data was available from those sources I truly thought only api had nitrite data, someone mentioned Red Sea did too the other day. The ability to compare...

www.reef2reef.com

Overall I found that on day 27 (before my vacation) that after seeing some drops in ammonia that even a dry rock setup that is ghost fed or dosed with lower dosages of ammonia can easily process 20% of ammonia added in 24 hours. Sure we can argue that this is not fully cycled but if dry rock is left to sit in a bucket with an ammonia source and moved to a tank on day 30, I wouldn't imagine a failed cycle would happen with a small or moderate bioload. The bacteria has enough time to establish. Yay

On this next slide I decided to take some more time for trim settings and collected the following data. I calibrated my ph, salinity, temperature probes and made a solution for ammonia dosing. In an insomnia filled night I got the following data.

Using a free ammonia calculator from https://www.hamzasreef.com/Contents/Calculators/FreeAmmonia.php to derive an expected value we can see that a new slide doesn't do great with trace ammonia without a trim factor. Post 2 will detail some experiments I am thinking about.

Late to the party…I compared your Seneye data to the data I acquired from a loaner (@Rick Mathew ). Seneye. They differ quite a bit. I have no theories for the large differences.

I plotted your data and my data. Your Seneye unit is overestimating the free ammonia by about 2.5 X. The unit I tested was accurate in the range of about 0.004-0.020 ppm free ammonia. Below and above these limits it followed a different calibration curve. Not sure what to make of this. @brandon429 might be disappointed at these wildly different results. On the positive side, the unit could be calibrated easily enough if you needed to know the actual ammonia level. Out of the box, no. The real life accuracy of the Seneye unit might be a disappointment without a correction factor.

 

[brandon429]

Did your seneye Neon ever get calibrated on a full running reef vs just calibrated in this test tank>

and if so, did it report above .001 nh3 yet under .009, and stay in an ever-changing state the whole time (vs stuck at say .003 for nine days)

how again was your seneye calibrated and tuned Neon when used on your mature reef

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

Late to the party…I compared your Seneye data to the data I acquired from a loaner (@Rick Mathew ). Seneye. They differ quite a bit. I have no theories for the large differences.

I plotted your data and my data. Your Seneye unit is overestimating the free ammonia by about 2.5 X. The unit I tested was accurate in the range of about 0.004-0.020 ppm free ammonia. Below and above these limits it followed a different calibration curve. Not sure what to make of this. @brandon429 might be disappointed at these wildly different results. On the positive side, the unit could be calibrated easily enough if you needed to know the actual ammonia level. Out of the box, no. The real life accuracy of the Seneye unit might be a disappointment without a correction factor.

I believe I might have an issue with my pH calibration probe procedure. The data I logged in the excel sheet above was prior to a trim but even still I realize its likely off. I used this data to find a trim value (I will have to post it here) but the offset did seem to align better.

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

Just to clarify and be straight forward, the data @Dan_P is referencing was used to derive a trim value

 

[brandon429]

So this was not calibrated on a running reef with the range and motion above?

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

No, it was never tested on a running reef and from what I see, Dan's was not either. Calibrating on a running reef prevents you from being able to dose ammonia in the full range to check the sensitivity.

This slide was pretty far off at the start but it was trimmed to reduce the error rate that Dan mentioned. The good news is that when I was reading zero, I was able to confirm that it was zero to some extent and I can't see error playing into the results I hope to obtain. I dose ammonia and wait for it to drop to zero. Rinse and repeat.

 

[brandon429]

There was not a reason to avoid that context. It’s a harmless proof to run that aligns your data with thousands of other owners but doesn’t remove the machines ability to indicate change on customized tests. Takes one hour or so of submersion for simple patterning among thousands of logged results, who are calibrated for just that range and activity.

Seneye data that comes from a proofed machine is what I like, it takes just a few mins to dip the reader into a real reef and at least see if the machine is instantly an outlier or not.

 

[Dan_P]

No, it was never tested on a running reef and from what I see, Dan's was not either. Calibrating on a running reef prevents you from being able to dose ammonia in the full range to check the sensitivity.

This slide was pretty far off at the start but it was trimmed to reduce the error rate that Dan mentioned. The good news is that when I was reading zero, I was able to confirm that it was zero to some extent and I can't see error playing into the results I hope to obtain. I dose ammonia and wait for it to drop to zero. Rinse and repeat.

What is meant by ““testing on a running reef”?

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

He is questioning the validity of the data because the device is not in my main display...

Sorry, as an engineer/scientist I don't calibrate equipment against nothing. We calibrate against constants and known values as much as possible.

 

[Dan_P]

There was not a reason to avoid that context. It’s a harmless proof to run that aligns your data with thousands of other owners but doesn’t remove the machines ability to indicate change on customized tests. Takes one hour or so of submersion for simple patterning among thousands of logged results, who are calibrated for just that range and activity.

Seneye data that comes from a proofed machine is what I like, it takes just a few mins to dip the reader into a real reef and at least see if the machine is instantly an outlier or not.

The Seneye reading like any other analytical device is as good as is its calibration. I bought three slides and they all differed somewhat, but all suffered from the same issue. Not accurate until 0.005 ppm and right on the money until 0.020 ppm, then inaccurate again.

The Seneye device is probably consistent like a Hanna Checker right out of the box but the slides might be another story and this is what Seneye might be keeping under wraps. They absolutely hate talking about calibrating their device but this might be absolutely necessary to obtain accurate NH3 readings.

You could use the Seneye NH3 sensing like an expensive Seachem ammonia alert badge when you don’t care about the actual amount of ammonia but you do care when it isn’t low. Then calibration might not be that important. Seneye could make extra money selling a reference standard to calibrate the device.

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

It would be nice to determine and come up with a trim value calculator. On my first go around (the data above) it showed it was reading high but I also concluded that my pH was likely off as well during calibration by about .08 based on expected values. Also Hanna salinity checker reads lower by about 1-1.5 ppt. So much error can go into proofing and calibrating these things that you have to recognize that you may be calibrating in the wrong direction.

Trying to dig through my statistics/probability text books to find the method used to calibrate (find expected value) given multiple variables. I will work up an example on expected NH3 given the range of error with my current devices.

 

[Dan_P]

He is questioning the validity of the data because the device is not in my main display...

Sorry, as an engineer/scientist I don't calibrate equipment against nothing. We calibrate against constants and known values as much as possible.

Oh, got it.

By the way, I am going through your post now because I am growing Bio-Spira biofilms in a 2 L “aquarium” with submerged microscope slides. I want to compare your ammonia consumption rates to my femto system and microscope slides.

 

[brandon429]

what harm to data collection would a one hour dip be in a display, harmful or not harmful

it either reflects the motion and range above or it doesn’t, that becomes part of legit patterning to know. To exclude that input is unnecessary even in science circles Neon


the collective postings of a thousand seneye nh3 readings aren’t just shabby data to disregard. If meters and reports that affect the nature of cycling science don’t have to be proofed in context, in a cycled reef, then don’t expect to wow any cable guys.

 

[NeonRabbit221B]

what harm to data collection would a one hour dip be in a display, harmful or not harmful

I can when I get a moment but its setup in the garage lol