Warren's Triton results

[wangspeed]

My turn to throw my data in. Somehow USPS lost my first shipment, but the second was received. I got the results back, and in the interest of fostering community knowledge, here they are.

Personal observations: I was running full zeovit previously, which constantly drained my K. I took the reactor offline and went to Ecobak plus biopellets. It appears that I no longer need to dose K! Interesting that AWT and Triton K testing seems to differ quite a bit. AWT always reads K very low for me (-50). I have 3 home test kits, Salifert (winner!), Red Sea (slow), and KZ (useless!). I'm going to stick with Salifert for home K testing. Also, I'm glad to see I am rid of Cu, which I think came in on a rock or something. Had inexplicable STN for a while there. I leave a bag of Cuprisorb in, just in case, these days. I see no downside. Like others stateside, I have mildly raised Li.

I'm also surprised about showing 0 P, and therefor PO4. I am not, nor have I ever, used any sort of PO4 adsorbent in thise tank. Even AWT always showed my values as low, but 0? Weird. At least my Hanna PO4 egg agrees, right? oh:

wangspeed-triton-201412-01

wangspeed-triton-201412-02

wangspeed-triton-201412-03

 

[swk]

Which salt are you using?

 

[wangspeed]

Oh yeah, should have included that. I'm running Red Sea normal (blue bucket) and dose BRS two part. Not much Mg uptake right now, so I manually dose it with weekly 10g water changes.

 

[swk]

Overall a very clean test! I use the same salt and had fantastic triton result

 

[Keithcorals]

I think I'm going back to the red sea blue bucket if water changes are needed the only thing I didn't like about it was the low boron but that's not hard to fix. Great looking test

How do your corals look with the low po4 and do you also have very low nitrate?

 

[wangspeed]

Yeah, my nitrates are very low as well. They don't register at all on the Red Sea nitrate tester and very low on AWT. My SPS and zoas look great, but LPS is a mixed bag.

 

[CoralFragZ]

Been using the blue bucket for about a year now with great results. I bought a 6 pack test kit, I will send my test in after the holiday considering he is not testing between the 19th and 2nd.

 

[Sangheili]

As you may know, if your PO4 and Nitrates are too low you may be using too much biopellets.

 

[wangspeed]

As you may know, if your PO4 and Nitrates are too low you may be using too much biopellets.

I'm actually using a RD recirculating BP reactor. I probably need to up my feeding a little, but when I took my old refugium offline, red turf algae escaped into the DT and seems to be unaffected by the low nutrients. I just got 2 turbos to help out. I generally try to avoid them since they are bulldozers, but I think I need bulldozers.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Salinity seems a tad high, almost 38 ppt, or sg = 1.0286.

 

[wangspeed]

Hmm. I use calibration fluid before each measurement. I have 2 vials of calibration fluid and 2 different refractometers and they match. Not saying mine is on but I'm surprised it's off by that much.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

What calibration fluid?

You can make your own if you have a good scale.

 

[wangspeed]

Sybon. I have a digital kitchen scale. Might give it a whirl.

 

[JimWelsh]

Salinity seems a tad high, almost 38 ppt, or sg = 1.0286.

Are you basing the salinity estimate simply on the Na value, or are you factoring in more than just that, Randy?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Are you basing the salinity estimate simply on the Na value, or are you factoring in more than just that, Randy?

Eyeballing sodium, calcium, magnesium and potassium and treating them all about the same.

I know you have a spreadsheet. How far off was I?

 

[JimWelsh]

You are correct, I have a spreadsheet. It assumes the following: 1) Values in Triton report are accurate to the precision stated in the units cited (mg/L). 2) Fluoride is at NSW levels. 3) Alkalinity is 3.25 meq/L. It also assumes that Triton units really are weight/volume (ml/L), as stated, and not weight/weight (mg/Kg), as expressed by Pilson.

Based on these assumptions, it calculates the amount of Cl that must be present to balance cations against anions after accounting for borate + carbonate alkalinity, and then infers the salinity (expressed as g/Kg of macro elements, referenced to Pilson's Chapter 4 values) after converting from mg/L to mg/Kg. Variation in alkalinity between 2.5 and 4.0 meq/L will only cause a change of up to +/- 0.026 in calculated salinity, so actual alkalinity value is not really relevant when rounding to just one decimal place, as long as tank alkalinity is within this reasonable range.

Using the above, I come up with a salinity of 36.4 for wangspeed's results.

I'd be happy to discuss the math behind my salinity estimation further, because I think it may be relevant to help normalize macro element results between various reports. I'd also like a second set of eyes on my math, just to make sure I'm not making some glaring error. I'm not through crunching all the data yet, but I suspect that many tanks may be being run at significantly different salinity than their well-calibrated refractometers may be reading, possibly due to the difference in the refractive index of tank water due to elevated or suppressed values in various ions relative to NSW. Just a hunch I have.

 

[JimWelsh]

(Why do I see others have edited their posts, but I cannot edit my posts?) EDIT: One other assumption I am making when converting from mg/Kg to mg/L: I have to assume a temperature. I am choosing 25C, so the conversion factor from mg/Kg to mg/L is 1.023343 (the density of seawater at 35PPT salinity and 25C temperature). I realize that this gets very complicated very quickly when dealing with solutions that differ in ionic composition from NSW, but I also am pretty sure that the error in analytical precision of the Trition method will very likely be significantly greater than any of the various parameters (alkalinity, fluoride, temperature, etc.) that I'm stressing over in my calculations.

 

[Hedgedrew]

Before everyone goes gaga oon red sea blue salt. And I was one of them, I would advise running the salt through fresh ro water and test thatwater not you tank. You may see things like extremely elevated magenese that interrupts or changes things in photosynthesis. Just please test the salt bucket not your tank, ,, it gets absorbed in your tank but couls be very dangerous with high light sps and gig increases in mm above sea water.

 

[Hedgedrew]

Maganese can really screw up a balances tank by letting in more light pennnetrationand frying corals in photosynthesis. Blue bucket red sea had over 50x nsw and I have burnt out. A lot of coral switching. Please for everyone who is looking at these reults realize your getting it from tank and already absorbed. I have been testing fresh batches up. AND I was disturbed by red sea results on high light acro

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

You are correct, I have a spreadsheet. It assumes the following: 1) Values in Triton report are accurate to the precision stated in the units cited (mg/L). 2) Fluoride is at NSW levels. 3) Alkalinity is 3.25 meq/L. It also assumes that Triton units really are weight/volume (ml/L), as stated, and not weight/weight (mg/Kg), as expressed by Pilson.

Based on these assumptions, it calculates the amount of Cl that must be present to balance cations against anions after accounting for borate + carbonate alkalinity, and then infers the salinity (expressed as g/Kg of macro elements, referenced to Pilson's Chapter 4 values) after converting from mg/L to mg/Kg. Variation in alkalinity between 2.5 and 4.0 meq/L will only cause a change of up to +/- 0.026 in calculated salinity, so actual alkalinity value is not really relevant when rounding to just one decimal place, as long as tank alkalinity is within this reasonable range.

Using the above, I come up with a salinity of 36.4 for wangspeed's results.

I'd be happy to discuss the math behind my salinity estimation further, because I think it may be relevant to help normalize macro element results between various reports. I'd also like a second set of eyes on my math, just to make sure I'm not making some glaring error. I'm not through crunching all the data yet, but I suspect that many tanks may be being run at significantly different salinity than their well-calibrated refractometers may be reading, possibly due to the difference in the refractive index of tank water due to elevated or suppressed values in various ions relative to NSW. Just a hunch I have.

Thanks, Jim. My first estimate was a bit high due to a mistake. I get 37.2 ppt from the total moles of cations alone, and then a little additional boost due to sulfate being abnormally high. Can you post a new thread in the chemistry forum and we can discuss the math in detail. There are actually a number of ways to do this that may be more or less accurate depending on the method being used to measure salinity (total moles, total weight, effective refractive index, effective conductivity, etc.).

The ion imbalance impacting refractive index is a potential concern. I address it here:

Refractometers and Salinity Measurement by Randy Holmes-Farley - Reefkeeping.com