Taylor Free Chlorine Test Slow?

[nlitch]

I have a new spa and i'm getting up to speed on the Bromine system slowly (the topic of a future post perhaps), as well as getting used to my Taylor K2006 test kit. So I'm using the free chlorine test to measure Bromine and dividing by 2.25. Unfortunately Bromine levels have been consistently low, so frequently after I add the two dippers of R-0870, there is no pink in the tube - I assume due to the levels of Bromine being so low.

I know it says you can keep adding more dippers until you see pink, but my experience in doing that has just been that the pink that eventually shows up will just go away after one drop of the R-0871, confirming that yes, the Bromine level is low. So I figure why bother wasting more dippers of the 0870, I know the Bromine is very low, good enough.

Sometime at that point however, I'll just leave the tube sitting where it is for a while, and sometimes notice that over time, the water turns pink. So couple of questions are:

1. Should I be adding the extra dippers and measuring, or will I always just get the trace level (below 0.5 or 0.2)?
2. What gives with the pink slowly showing up? Could my test kit be old/faulty? Should I test after that point, or does the color just show up given more time even in trace amounts of Bromine

Thanks

 

[JamesW]

I know that the conventional wisdom is that you don't do a combined bromine test like you do with a chlorine system.

However, my observation is that there is substantially more combined bromine than chlorine.

This can be due to several factors.

Some might actually be combined bromine, especially if the bromine is combining with non nitrogen compounds.

Some might be ozone or MPS or bromates.

In any case, do the CC part of the test to see what that shows.

CC or CB (Combined Bromine) can bleed through to the free bromine section.

In addition, oxygen in the air can interfere with the test if you wait long enough.