So, I ordered the Red Sea Reef Foundation Pro test kit last week from Bulk Reef Supply. Awesome site by the way…
So anyway, I wanted to post a few pictures and give my thoughts on the kit for others that may be wondering about it. Here are a couple of pictures of the kit:
As you can tell from the second to last picture in this group, the vials are all located in their own spot in the lid of the case. One of the nicest things I found with this kit is, those vials are glass, not plastic like other tests. This means no scratches (unless you REALLY try hard to scratch them)…
The Reef Foundations kit contains test kits for Calcium, Magnesium, and Alk/dKH. Here are pictures of those kits:
Calcium:
Magnesium:
Alk/dKh:
Also included in the kit are the cards that tell you how to conduct the tests as well as what the tests readings mean, on the opposite side. Here are photos of those cards:
Lastly, and one of the nicest pieces of this kit is the holder for the 1 ml syringe that you conduct the titration with. Here are a couple of pictures of that:
Now that you’ve seen the pictures… here are my thoughts.
If you are used to conducting the Salifert tests, these tests are very similar. The holder for the 1ml syringe is a little tough to use at first for someone with smaller hands, although for all of the tests, the first thing it instructs you to do is to fill the syringe with the titration liquid until the stopper reaches the 1 ml mark. Then it tells you to immediately squirt either .6 or .4 ml of the titration liquid into the vial. So it makes it a little easier to handle the holder with the syringe in it. The titration part of the test is a little tricky. I felt that the salifert syringes were a little easier to use, and here is why… When I tried to push on the syringe from this test kit, it almost felt like it was sticking and then it would let loose and shoot a stream of liquid into the vial. Over time it may get better, and that may have been the case with the salifert test at first as well, I can’t remember.
The hardest test for me to conduct actually seemed to me like it was going to be the easiest… and that was the Alk/dKh… the test tells you to put a portion of the titration liquid in and then continue to put the liquid in by the drop until it changes color, but for me it had to go from a pinkish red color to an orange and it was kind of difficult for me to tell when it changed… but all in all it wasn’t really bad and took me a couple of tries to get it right without feeling like I was going over the number of drops needed to change the color.
My overall thoughts is that this is a very nice test kit. I can’t speak to how accurate it is, since I don’t have any sort of lab grade equipment to test it against. The only downside I really saw to the kit, in my opinion, was that the cards tell you the readings based on the amount of titration liquid used instead of what the syringe is reading, like the salifert tests do. So I had to do some math in order to figure out the reading, which really wasn’t that bad…
If you get this kit, I completely recommend reading the small manual that comes with it. There is a section in the very back that talks about how to actually conduct the tests and goes into more detail than the picture on the card. A good example is with the magnesium test… You have to put in 1 drop of the ‘A’ liquid then shake for 15 minutes, you do this 5 times. Then you put in 5 drops of the ‘B’ liquid, shake a couple of times and wait 60 seconds before performing the titration… I didn’t realize that the first time I did it and after only looking at the card, I shook the vial for 60 seconds after adding the ‘B’ liquid. However, they want to see a little bit of collection to form at the bottom of the vial before you perform the titration. You only realize that by reading the actual instructions (I know, go figure!)
Hope this helps some of you that may have been on the fence with this kit, or are in need of a new kit in the near future. Any questions, just let me know.