Raising Tadpoles (Day 133) - How to Measure Water Hardness
Day 133
The process of testing water hardness, either general hardness or carbonate hardness, is a simple titration process. In laymen's terms, titration is performed by dropping a known amount of liquid into another. In this case, the 'known amount of liquid' is the volume of however many drops the process takes. Titration requires the adding and mixing of the liquid into the solution (water in this case) until a visible color change is observed, once that happens, you now know what the concentration of water ever substance you were testing for is. With this water hardness test kit, from API, the actual components are not disclosed, meaning I can't tell you the exact reactions behind it in this instance. The test is conducted by adding 5ml of aquarium water to the test tube (which is marked at the appropriate section), next the drops are added to the water by the correct testing bottle one drop at a time, the water will initially turn orange for the general hardness test and blue for the carbonate hardness test, once the concentration is reached, the water will turn green for the general hardness test and yellow for the carbonate hardness test. The number of drops that it takes to cause the change in the water color is then multiplied by 17.9 and gives you the water hardness in parts per million, ppm.
I tested the carbonate hardness, KH, values for both the 10 gallon tadpole tank and the 20 gallon frog aquarium. It took 9 drops to reach the concentration for the 10 gallon tank and 11 drops to reach the concentration for the 20 gallon tank. Using the 17.9 conversion, this translates into a carbonate hardness of about 161 ppm for the 10 gallon and carbonate hardness value of roughly 197 ppm for the 20 gallon. This difference in carbonate values isn't particularly surprising given the amount of baking soda I required in order to balance the PH levels of the two tanks, though it seems to have paid off as the newly transferred froglets are in perfectly good health as far as I can tell.
Current Totals:
13 - 10 gallon (Tadpole Tank)
30 - 20 gallon (Frog Tank) [6 froglet, 24 juvenile]
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