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Drop checker solution

Fisher2007

Member
Joined
19 Feb 2018
Messages
430
Location
Warrington
Just wondering how frequently people change their drop checker solution?

Also, I stumblee across a You Tube video the other day or someone making their own. Anyone done that or is it not worth the hassle vs cost?

Cheers
 
Anyone done that or is it not worth the hassle vs cost?

The way it is described to be as precise as possible in the end result with making 5 litres 4 Dkh fluid from demineralized water and baking soda. Might be a tad not worth the hassle. What the heck are we going to do with 5 litres of that stuff? Providing 6 family generations over sufficiently stocked for multiple tank syndrome?

But if you happen to have a weight scale down to 0.01 gram (1 Cg) you can come pretty close to making smaller volumes.

Of course the smaller the volume to mix the more likely to make an error and end up with 4,3 Dkh. But then again how important is accuracy to the decimal for hobby use. the only way we have to check for Dkh is a drop tester 1° per 1 drop. :)

I didn't worry much about it and made 500ml 4Dkh fluid with the use of a Cg weight scale. And imho it worked like a charm. A 0.01 weight scale is € 11 maybe from Ebay and also something worth having in the toolbox. Fun to have fun to play fun to do, thus well worth it. Also use this weight scale to dry fert my tanks.
 
The way it is described to be as precise as possible in the end result with making 5 litres 4 Dkh fluid from demineralized water and baking soda. Might be a tad not worth the hassle. What the heck are we going to do with 5 litres of that stuff? Providing 6 family generations over sufficiently stocked for multiple tank syndrome?

But if you happen to have a weight scale down to 0.01 gram (1 Cg) you can come pretty close to making smaller volumes.

Of course the smaller the volume to mix the more likely to make an error and end up with 4,3 Dkh. But then again how important is accuracy to the decimal for hobby use. the only way we have to check for Dkh is a drop tester 1° per 1 drop. :)

I didn't worry much about it and made 500ml 4Dkh fluid with the use of a Cg weight scale. And imho it worked like a charm. A 0.01 weight scale is € 11 maybe from Ebay and also something worth having in the toolbox. Fun to have fun to play fun to do, thus well worth it. Also use this weight scale to dry fert my tanks.

I'm tempted to give it a go. I already bought a scale that low for dry ferts anyway
 
Months between my changes, it still keep changing colour fro blue to yellowish green so it's fine IMO

Is that what most people do then? I only ask because I saw on the bottle it said every two to three weeks, and everything I've learned about fish keeping over the years is that the marketing departments at the various brands love to get us replacing things much more frequently than is required
 
Sometimes people experience heavy biofilm build up in the drop checker, mainly on the glass inside the airlock.
Since this is hermetically closed airlock with a 99% humidity saturation it's an ideal environment for biofilm to grow.

And that's about the only pollution that can occur in the drop checker. My best guess is even if you don't see an obvious biofilm growing there still will be one present after a while. There also might be a tiny moisture exchange between tank water and drop checker fluid, after all both are basically water. But if the drop checker is in the tank water in both will have the same temperature. That might be different with a hang on DC taking the outside environmental temp.

And i guess all this will probably have very little effect on the actual Kh value from the fluid.

Obviously a DC fluid manufacturer manual is next to commercial also a better safe than sorry, one size fits all solution.
 
Hi all,
or someone making their own. Anyone done that or is it not worth the hassle vs cost?
It is easy to do, you just need sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) and bromothymol blue pH indicator.
The way it is described to be as precise as possible in the end result with making 5 litres 4 Dkh fluid from demineralized water and baking soda.
Because baking soda is really cheap you could make up 5 litres of solution, it is much easier to work with <"larger weights and volumes"> and then just add <"bromothymol blue"> to make up 500 cm3 etc. of drop checker fluid.

cheers Darrel
 
Because baking soda is really cheap you could make up 5 litres of solution, it is much easier to work with <"larger weights and volumes"> and then just add <"bromothymol blue"> to make up 500 cm3 etc. of drop checker fluid.

Yes, that is what i always thought to understand from the general guidelines found on the internet. That it is cheap and easier and or more precise to work with kitchen weight scale in grams and litres instead of centigrams and centilitres.

My personal take and question i asked myself on it was. What the heck am i going to do with 5-litre base fluid to make the final 500ml 4Dkh i want in the cabinet? Store 4,5 litres till the end of times in the closet or waste it? 500ml already will last me 500 refills the least.

And do I really need to be spot-on accurate to the 0.1 Dkh to make it work?

I guessed not and took a juwlers weight scale recalculated the amounts back to centigrams per litre and made a small batch. The possible < then 0.5 Dkh inaccuracy in the end result i took for granted, can't measure it anyway. And possibly having 4.3Dkh in the drop checker also doesn't reflect in a huge CO² discrepancy in the tank water. Having 30 or 35mg/L CO² tops in the tank doesn't make a huge difference. As long as it's stable i'm ok..

So that's how i came up with this idea.

Even if its cheap, what use is it to make if i don't use it? :)
 
If you have Potassium Bicarbonate to hand you can use that as a plant safer alternative to adding Sodium to the tank if you ever dislodge the DC and it tips the contents out into the tank, I've done it on a few occasions and the only worry was that I accidentally fed the plants a little more K.
 
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