Mardel Master Water Test Kit Strips (Freshwater/Saltwater), 50ct

I consider myself a serious aquarist with a setup that cost me over $3000 for my overly spoiled Koi and fancy goldfish. I recently moved from Pennsylvania to New York City where the water quality is not nearly as friendly toward goldfish nor consistent coming out of the tap and so I find myself testing the water many times in between scheduled water changes from the tank as well as the faucet.

I can't stress enough how convenient it is to dip one of these strips and be done with all the testing in one shot, but also consider that the liquid tests are not much more economical.

Each strip costs around $0.20, and with 5 tests all done within about a minute.

Even if you are doing the regular liquid 'drop-tests' for Ph, Nitrate, and Nitrite, those tests typically run at best $0.15 ($0.05 per test), and you're looking at a few minutes for each individually. I personally got tired of rinsing the tubes and leaving them somewhere to dry. But, I would also gladly spend a penny per minute to not have to go through all that.

These test strips are really convenient and fast. They also appear to be seriously inaccurate. First of all, for nitrate and nitrate I could never get the strip colors to match any of the colors on the standard. Second, for ammonia it always showed clear, which means fine, but which made me suspicious because the tank I'm testing is just a week old, and there SHOULD be some ammonia. After some advice from other fishkeepers I bought the more expensive (and slower and more tedious) API test kit. Sure enough, that not only clearly shows nitrate and nitrite (in expected quantities), but also shows a LOT of ammonia. The API test kit is more expensive initially, and definitely not as convenient to use as the strips, but I'll trade a little convenience for accuracy any day.

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I really enjoy using this kit as it gives accurate, I believe, test results in a relative short period of time. But it has an "extra" step when discovering the ammonia levels of aquarium water. One has to fill a tiny tube (provided) with aquarium water and then vigorously dip the test strip in that water for thirty seconds. The results are then available. Other test kits I have used omit this "extra" step and thus are a tad easier to use. I still well recommnded this kit.

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