Ok, I found something on test strips.
The strips that are normally bought, 20 or so of them and loose in a plastic bottle in a LFS or chain store have been bounced around and the separate components that should never touch each other have come in contact with the other sections allowing for cross contamination of the chemicals. This throws the test results off, often massively.
Also, when you dip the test strip in the water, you have wet the entire surface and this allowed for more cross contamination of the reactive chemicals.
Test strips where there is one test per strip and individually wrapped are supposed to be very accurate. They are a Little more costly but much more accurate. Now if I can find them I will make sure to let everyone know where to get them. A couple sources said that you can find individually wrapped test strips for all water parameters accurate enough for aquaria but no one listed a source just that they got them from pharmaceutical companies.
How reliable this information I don't know. Again going off of multiple articles and trying to make a complete one that covers the basics. It does make sense though and explains why some of them can be very accurate where a majority of them seem to give extremely inaccurate results and are simply not worth the headache of saving a couple bucks over a good liquid test kit.
The strips that are normally bought, 20 or so of them and loose in a plastic bottle in a LFS or chain store have been bounced around and the separate components that should never touch each other have come in contact with the other sections allowing for cross contamination of the chemicals. This throws the test results off, often massively.
Also, when you dip the test strip in the water, you have wet the entire surface and this allowed for more cross contamination of the reactive chemicals.
Test strips where there is one test per strip and individually wrapped are supposed to be very accurate. They are a Little more costly but much more accurate. Now if I can find them I will make sure to let everyone know where to get them. A couple sources said that you can find individually wrapped test strips for all water parameters accurate enough for aquaria but no one listed a source just that they got them from pharmaceutical companies.
How reliable this information I don't know. Again going off of multiple articles and trying to make a complete one that covers the basics. It does make sense though and explains why some of them can be very accurate where a majority of them seem to give extremely inaccurate results and are simply not worth the headache of saving a couple bucks over a good liquid test kit.