jarthel said:
I won't be putting any fish until the plants has settled down. maybe a month or 2 after setting up the plants.
Yep, this is the proper approach. The various points of view about which kits to get are all coming from the angle of "Ooh, I want to get fish in the tank ASAP". My approach is completely different. It's more like; "You have no business adding fish to your tank until you figure out what you're doing"
If I have no schedule or pressure to add fish to the planted tank then why do I need to measure anything? Who cares what the ammonia or nitrite test kit reading is? I can guarantee you that within 6-8 weeks the tank would have cycled. It can't not happen if you follow the basic procedures. The real concern is learning how to grow healthy plants and how to avoid algal blooms. I've annihilated more fish with CO2 than ammonia, that's for sure. So even after this cycle period, you still need to figure out injection rates. CO2 is a challenging technique, and it's made much more difficult when you have to worry about gassing your fish. If you don't worry about adding fish, guess what? There is no stress. No fish means you don't have to buy food or worry about organic waste due to uneaten food.
So that's why it would never occur to me to spend money on any test kit, except for the CO2 dropchecker. Set the tank up, add as many fast growing plants as you can afford, add water, nutrients and CO2 and don't go over the top with lighting. Do 50% water changes 2X per week (or more) for the first couple of months. Sit back and relax. Leave the fish out of the equation and the level of complication will decrease exponentially. Look at your plants every day as long as you can. (I mean, that's why you have them, to look at them right?) The more you look at the plants, the more you will learn about them. It's that simple. All the arguments about how beginners don't know anything is completely laughable. Can you tell when a plant is growing? Of course you can. Can you tell when a plant is dying? Yeah, I'll bet you can. Program your mind to learn the skills of observation instead of programming it to trust test kits. I've never seen a test kit solve a problem that couldn't already be solved by observation. Sure, later on, after you understand what you can observe, then you can use test kits because you would have learned to place a priority on your skills of observation, rather than on some chemistry set.
By the way, have you read Ed's Tutorial
Setting up a higher tech planted tank?
Cheers,