Basic Aquarium Water Testing

Water testing is something that all aquarists should be doing routinely but the truth is many don’t do it enough. The reasons for this are primarily twofold. The first reason is that many of the kits are ++very expensive++ in fact some of the kits are prohibitively expensive. It is not uncommon as of 7/20/26 to find price tags of $50 and greater on brand new kits. The second reason is that these kits are very hard to use. Squeeze too hard and one more drop goes into the tube, you need to start over. Did I mention that there is another bottle to use after the first bottle? Oh the next part is timed, you need to shake X amount of times and then compare it to a key that never seems to exactly match what you see. These factors ensure that most hobbyists do not test their water enough and are actually woefully under informed as to how their tanks behave morning, noon, and night. The best kit on the market is as of 7/20/26 the Aquarium Co op kit. This kit features ease of use with every test strip testing nitrate, nitrite, hardness, buffer, pH, and chlorine at the same time. The limitation on this kit is that it ignores perhaps the single greatest reading that we need as aquarists, ammonia. This kit is reasonable for its price with 200 tests costing $20.

Where this kit shines is when you have species that require exceedingly soft water. In situations where RO DI is demanded as well as pH supplements such as alder cones, indian catappa leaves, peat, and jackfruit leaves. It is easy to experience pH crashes at night and thereby negatively affecting fish health. This kit does allow you to gather data to see for instance if the equilibrium dosage that your using is in fact sufficient a buffer to protect against pH crashes in your aquarium at night. This is where these kits end up shining in the aquarium hobby. The kits provide objective, actionable data by which conditions can be tweaked in order to improve fish health. While some charting may be necessary to follow the affect of changes that you make by in large almost no one that I know in the hobby feels the need to keep long term records. Recording of parameters is largely done when we suspect something is wrong and it gives us objective data that we can take action upon.

One final thing that I would like to address. New hobbyists often look at old books and see listed pH ranges that are described as ideal in that they represent the most natural conditions where the fish come from. From here hobbyists are then sold harsh chemicals whose purpose is to send the hobbyist chasing the target pH by either rapidly raising it or lowering it. This is a very bad idea for two reasons. First pH shock is a real thing and it can be lethal to the fish who is used to one condition and then rapidly gets exposed to another. The second is that its just plain wasteful. There are ways using organics to manipulate the pH of a tank that is safe and natural that does not rely on muriatic, sulfuric or acetic acids swinging conditions rapidly from one extreme to another. These pH remedies are often not necessary. Fish are often times now use to the water and the conditions where the hobbyist lives. Having now been many generation removed from the wild they have been artificially evolved to live in the new environment where the hobbyist is from thus the fish can live a happy life in treated tap water where you live. There is no real actual need for additional manipulation with the vast majority of aquarium fish now in the hobby.

EDIT: At the time of this writing 7/20/26, I was unaware that Aquarium Co op has a separate product for detecting ammonia. This product runs $26 per 100 tests. I do not have any operational knowledge concerning this product so I can’t comment at this time on its reliability.