Auto-Testers & Dosers
With normal freshwater, pond and tropical dish keeping, water tests are mostly carried out to detect (or hope not to detect in some circumstances) ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. When you move to the salty variety, its a completely different ball game, especially if you are looking to keep corals. Off the top of my head you want to test for salinity, PH, calcium, magnesium, potassium, presence of heavy metals. Traditionally these test were done manually using small bottles of chemicals mixed in with a sample of your tank water, and then the resulting colors compared to a chart to give you a reading. Modern tech has started to remove these tedious actions and have automated them.
The Seneye will look at your tank’s temperature, PH and ammonia levels, recording the data on a chart which can view on your PC. If readings are above or below predetermined parameters, an email and/or SMS alert can be sent directly to you alerting you of this.
Another device is from Mindstream, which caters more for the marine fish-keepers as it also tests for salinity, calcium, potassium, oxygen and CO2.
But what if the readings from the test are off? Well with modern advancements we now have auto dosers that will help rectify your water parameters, such as the GHL Doser. The GHL Doser will add small amounts of trace elements to your tank’s waters to balance out the readings. Again all data from these auto dosers can be accessed via your computer, tablet or smartphone.
