I test 4 times a day with an iV on my 75 gallon as well as 4 times a day with a Carer on my 35 gallon. Both get dumped back into the tank. I’m a huge Hydros fan, but I like the Carer better for testing. Easier and more consistent results, IME/IMO.
I wanted to start a thread giving my experience with the new Kamoer KH Carer.
I have recently started using the Kamoer KH carer. Before I go into what I think of the unit I thought I should explain why I got one.
My tank is a RedSea 750XXL I set the tank up after moving to my new home 5 years ago Pic of my previous tank below sorry about the poor resolution.
With my new tank I removed alot of the corals and tried to restart everything from frags. The SPS started to do well until I flew back with reefapalooza Chicago with some frags last year. I am not sure what happened but as soon as I put the new SPS frags in all of my SPS RTNd. It was like they brought in some kind of bacterial infection. I have been trying to rebuild the tank but everything has been RTNing. What compounded the issue was that as the SPS RTNd my Alk shot up from 9 to 12 and I think that made everything worse. I felt that if I had caught the problem sooner I could have reduced my dosing and I might not have lost all of the SPS but because I didn't the alk spike just made the RTN even worse.
I started testing with a Hanna Checker every daily to mitigate this problem but SPS have not been able to live in the tank since. I eventually slipped into testing every 3-5 days due to life. I became a new Dad 2 months ago and the daily testing is just not an achievable thing any moire. I started getting actual SPS growth about a month ago and then left on a hunting trip. When I came home I found the rug by the tank soggy. The glass redsea sump had cracked from top to bottom and water was dripping out. Amazingly only about 5-10 gallons of water was on the floor and the leak slipped right around where I had my leak sensors placed. The tank's salinity dropped from 1.026 to 1.021 and my alk was again at 11.5 when it was at 8.5 before I left. All SPS died except for 1 Acro.
I learned a couple of things.
1. I need more leak sensors
2. I need some way of automating KH testing. My most successful tanks were when I worked at the LFS and I had hours next to the tank every day and I could pay attention to every detail. I dosed everything manually and tested everything manually but I can't do that now with where I am in life.
I picked up a KH Carer as a Christmas gift to myself. I chose the KH carer over the other automatic KH testers for a couple of reasons.
1. I wanted something that I could use stand-alone. I don't always use controllers and I use different controller ecosystems so I really didn't want something proprietary.
2. I wanted to be able to maintain the unit myself and the simple titration-based testing system that uses a pH probe and dosing pumps was something I could easily take care of myself.
3. I liked the affordability of the reagents and the fact that the reagent is not proprietary.
4. I prefer good hardware over good software. I will put up with a buggy app if it means stuff doesn't break. Since Kamoer makes the internals of some other testers and I have had good experiences with their dosing pumps I thought that the hardware in the Kamoer would be the best available.
I went to set up the unit this weekend. The instructions included are awful and make no sense, But once I opened the App and added the unit the app walks you through the initial setup. you need to calibrate the pH probe, the saltwater feed pump that adds tank water to the testing beaker, calibrate the KH dosing pump, and prime the reagent pump. I was surprised you don't calibrate the regent pump or the wastewater pump but I have since learned that the exact flow rate of the waste pump doesn't matter. It just needs to empty the beaker after the test. The reagent pump can be calibrated but there is more on that later. The pH probe comes with pH 7.0 and pH 9.89 solution but you can also use pH 4 and pH 7 which is good for maintenance.
I called CoralVue and they recommended testing with the unit 12 times per day for 1 day before doing the final calibration to let all of the pumps and tubing break in. The unit was 4 dKH higher than my Hanna Checker at this time. After the break-in, you can calibrate the reagent pump. The app lets you calibrate the regent pump traditionally or you can perform a test and then tell the app what the actual alk is. It then infers the correct reagent flow rate. I decided to calibrate to my Hanna Checker and this worked well for me. This morning Hanna read 8.1 and KH Carer read 8.15.
I realized after the fact that I needed dosing containers for the KH reagent and KH buffer. So I added them in yesterday. This messed up the calibration and I needed to recalibrate again. You can choose to have a third container for your waste or add the waste back to the tank. The reagent is sulfuric acid so it will lower the pH of the tank slightly if you add it back to the tank. I have been adding the waste to the tank and have not noticed any pH drop.
Right now I am just testing and not dosing. I don't plan on dosing with the unit for some time. Right now my alk demand is met with kalk and I want to keep using kalk until I can't and then I will add in alk solution with the KH Carer.
So far I like the unit. It seems any time you replace the reagent, alter the tubing length, or generally mess with the unit it will need to be recalibrated but recalibrating is simple and once it is dialed in I shouldn't need to touch it very often. I plan to mix up a large container of regent to avoid frequent recalibration.
The alkalinity seems consistent with my Hanna checker but the pH reading does not match my Apex. I recalibrated both probes with the same solutions last night and they still don't match. My Apex is reading 8.0 to 8.2 and the KH Carer is reading 7.6-7.8 and it only reads when it tests. I believe the little bit of leftover sulfuric acid on the probe and test beaker skews the results down.
Stay tuned for more updates.
Itll go from 8.3 to 8.1 to 7.8 back to 8.2.
Right, it will drop. But not drop go back up and drop again with no dosing lol
I wouldn’t say that’s an issue. If everything is calibrated
if those are the consistent multiple readings you’re getting day in and day out I’d be happy with them, especially if they’re the same results at the same times of day.
