Water Tests
Water tests for your aquarium
If you want to know what is going on in the aquarium with regard to the nutrient situation, you can't do without high-quality water tests. Plant aquaristics in genral and aquascaping in particular, do not rely on the robust run-off-the-mill plants, which still get by in dim light and and only little nutrients - the most beautiful aquatic plants are in their majority very demanding and wish good conditions. These should definitely be offered to them, but a nutrient imbalance opens the door to algae plagues and other problems in the aquarium. The article "Liebig's law of minimum" in our Aquascaping Wiki explains why this is the case, and the article "Algae in the aquarium", tells you how to handle an algic pest after it's come up.
However, nutrient imbalances can not only be recognized by the emergence of algae, but also deficiency symptoms on aquatic plants show us very well if something's amiss in the aquarium. If you then have a suitable water test at hand, you can take targeted countermeasures and above all be sure that you won't jump out of the frying pan and into the fire because you have added too much of the missing nutrient.
Here in Aquasabi's online shop you can purchase water tests specially designed for aquaristics and aquascaping from the proven brands JBL and Seachem. You can run individual tests for nitrate, phosphate, potassium, copper, CO2, silicate, the pH value, oxygen, ammonium / ammonia, nitrite, magnesium and many other substances important for plant fertilization and for aquaristics in general. In our online shop we also offer multitests in strip form, which give you a rough overview of the nutrient situation in your aquarium.
If you want to know everything exactly, you will also find the very precise, lab-grade Visocolor ECO tests from Macherey Nagel in our shop, with which you can achieve significantly more accurate and precise results. This allows you to precisely determine the values of your aquarium water and find out exactly how much chloride, sulphate, iron, potassium, phosphate, calcium or nitrate is present in your aquarium. Macherey Nagel also offers a test for total hardness, carbonate hardness and pH value. Of course you can also get spare parts for these tests like measuring spoons, cuvettes and test tubes with cap.