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LaMotte Phosphate Kits
Jeff Bodin reports a problem with his LaMotte phosphate test kit always
reading a suspicious zero. It sounds like the reagents may be bad -- they
have a shelf live of one or two years. LaMotte actually makes several
phosphate kits. I have their 7416 which is excellent. It tests 0 to 1.0 ppm
but you can dilute a test sample with distilled water to test higher
concentrations. What I especially like is that the lowest liquid reference
in the comparator is the color for 0.05 ppm (the others are 0.1, 0.2, 0.3,
0.4, 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 ppm).
Our tapwater has about 0.6 ppm and was the main cause of our Great Algae
Wars, which we won with the aid of PhosGuard. Aluminum oxide resins are
said to keep the level at about 0.03 ppm, and in fact the blue I get with
this kit is roughly half as intense as the 0.05 reference. (Another LaMotte
phosphate kit tests 0-2 ppm, but the first of the eight references is zero
and the next is 0.2 ppm. This seems a waste of a reference; zero in the
7416 kit is a colorless solution.) I verify that my kit is working not only
by the faint blue I get -- when I rinse out the test tube a little tap
water intensifies the blue color. I have nothing but praise for LaMotte
kits, the one exception being the superior Hach 0-1 ppm Iron kit with the
color wheel and economical, prepackaged powder pillows.
Jared in Augusta GA, where we may soon need a third digit to report the max
temp.
___________________________________________________________
Jared Weinberger jweinberger at knology_net
______ http://www.knology.net/~jweinberger/ ________