Some of you will find this obvious, but for others this will help greatly in getting consistent results.
I have never trusted my Hanna calcium checker to give me consistent results, I have tried many things, and have always been disappointed with the consistently compared to my other Hanna checkers, to the point of just not using it. I bought their special RODI water, careful testing, experimenting with premixing of the sample between adding "B", and everything else I could think of. Countless searches, and questions to fellow reefers yielded no answers. Some folks swear by them, while others agree that they are inconsistent. So I went about it scientifically. I bought some standards, and wasted countless tests. For those of you that do it right like my GF, and others who don't have issue it is painfully obvious, for those who have issue this is a eureka moment. It comes down to the 1 ul sample pipette pump. You should be depressing the pipette until you feel resistance to collect the sample, not until you bottom it out. Press it once while thinking about it, and it will make perfect sense. Depress it all the way to drain the sample into the vial. This resulted in a perfect samples, and was within 7 PPM of my standard. Finally repeatable results!
I have never trusted my Hanna calcium checker to give me consistent results, I have tried many things, and have always been disappointed with the consistently compared to my other Hanna checkers, to the point of just not using it. I bought their special RODI water, careful testing, experimenting with premixing of the sample between adding "B", and everything else I could think of. Countless searches, and questions to fellow reefers yielded no answers. Some folks swear by them, while others agree that they are inconsistent. So I went about it scientifically. I bought some standards, and wasted countless tests. For those of you that do it right like my GF, and others who don't have issue it is painfully obvious, for those who have issue this is a eureka moment. It comes down to the 1 ul sample pipette pump. You should be depressing the pipette until you feel resistance to collect the sample, not until you bottom it out. Press it once while thinking about it, and it will make perfect sense. Depress it all the way to drain the sample into the vial. This resulted in a perfect samples, and was within 7 PPM of my standard. Finally repeatable results!