Borate Test Strips - Useless

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MarkTX

MarkTX

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Bronze Supporter
Nov 15, 2015
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Cypress, TX
Okay, I read on this forum that the Lamotte test strips are the best...I have some. Is it just me, or do they change color right before your eyes? As in, you have to dip them at the perfect depth, for the perfect length of time, and then read the results after the perfect length of time?

Honestly, these strips are useless to me. Depending on when I look, I might have 10 ppm or 80 ppm.

I think the open-loop Pool Math page is much more useful here.
 
I have a link to the mannitol titration test in my signature. I have used it with great success and others have too.

I have the strips too and I just use them for a ballpark number to know if I'm low or not. My pH stability goes a little haywire (acid demand increases) when my borates drop to 30ppm so I use the strips as a diagnostic when my acid demand seems unusually high. Other than that, they sit in their bottle.
 
MarkTX said:
Good lord! What chemistry professor came up with that?
Cheers :)
Click to expand...

Believe me, most of the chemical tests we use to detect specific ions have been around since the turn of the LAST century!! Anyone who has ever taken a quantitative/analytical chemistry course in college (typically 2nd year chemistry course) would be very familiar with all of these tests (and will have spent many hours on nights and weekends doing these tests as part of their lab practicals). Back in the days before computers and laser interferometers, chemists actually had to mix solutions in bottles, know how to make up standard stock solutions of reagents and learn how to titrate samples in order to work their way through flow charts of various tests in order to rule out or positively identify various chemical species. It was painstakingly tedious work but any chemist worth his salt could do these tests in their sleep to very high degrees of accuracy. So as complicated as some of these tests might seem, they would be the grunt work given to the lab apprentice to do in the laboratories of the great analytical chemists of the past.

And that boron test, once you do it a few times, is not as complicated as it seems ;)
 
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