High Tide Aquatics

Took a look at the new Ultra low range phosphate checker

Was looking at the measurements to see if it is worth checking.

Ultra low Phosphate
Range 0.00-0.90 ppm
Resolution 0.01 ppm
Accuracy 0.02ppm or 5% of reading

Ultra low Phosphorus (converted to phosphate in ppm)
Range 0 - 200 ppb (0.613 ppm)
Resolution 1 ppb (0.003 ppm)
Accuracy 5 ppb or 5% (0.015 ppm)

Guess I'll be keeping my Phosphorus checker. Using Fusion to log and it converts it automatically anyway.
 
The 50% higher range is nice.

And they say they improved the annoying short time-out period.

Not enough to make me want to upgrade, but it does seem like an upgrade.
 
Resolution is determined literally by the screen read-out decimal places, not a real measure of accuracy, precision, or even usefulness. In this case it is irrelevant, since the accuracy variability is higher than the resolution for both. If they increased the resolution 10 fold by increasing the screen size and adding space for another decimal, it wouldn’t make it a better test in any way.

Accuracy is practically identical between them. You will never notice the difference, and it’s a somewhat theoretical number anyway (same 5% based on the factory spectrophotometer specs used in both). If you get a reading of 0.20 ppm phosphate, is there a big difference whether the upper range of the real value is 0.215 or 0.220? Or just that it’s higher or lower than your last test?

The useful range increasing from 0.00-0.61 to 0.00-0.90 is a noticeable improvement for anyone who might get up into that range.

The timeout bug fix is important to a lot of people, since it makes it a bit stressful to use.

The result shown in phosphate is useful to anyone who doesn’t use automatic correction in Fusion or some other software, and in general is just better for hobbyists.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty clearly an upgrade. But not enough to make me want to spend another $50 to replace my old unit.
 
The short timeout is so annoying. As for accuracy, it doesn’t really matter since most people eyeball 10 ml into the cuvette anyway.


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