Thinking about a Neptune Trident -- What's everyone's experience?

[pledosophy]

What actually happened? Did they just stop reading properly or was there mechanical failures?

Mechanical failure

The pump that pulls the samples from the tank always seems to clog or stall. It's not hard to take apart and fix, it is just tedious and time consuming.

 

[pledosophy]

Aquawiz looks good too because no reagent, but it is only alk. However, alk is probably the most important and all you need. Calc and Mag usually don't change that much and you can test it weekly. And it is pretty ugly tho. LOL. No costs were invested in the looks.

With many two parts, you can dial in your dosing from just the alk. Just dose an equal amount of the other. Brightwell contains magnesium as well.

If you are running a CA reactor, you pretty much just need to test alk as well. I used to go a loooooooooooong time with my reactor and never test calcium, just monitored the alk every morning.

 

[Deleted member 20245]

I run a CaRx across all my tanks but recently going back to -parts for fine-grain control. That is — on low (or mostly softies) tank, calcium doesn’t consume them much. Over time, you’ll have this weird imbalance low alk and high calcium. Once things are settled, I’ll turn the CaRx back online.

As for testing, having an hourly alk reading would be cool - you can fine-tune to turn on/off co2 to flatten out your alk curve. You can equally do this with 2-parts as well.

Trident: super cool when it’s good; however, painful and time consuming when it goes bad…

 

[isaacalves]

Based on the feedback it seems these things have too many mechanical components for home use. Makes sense for a shop or something more commercial where you have constant maintenance. Which I don't want that added responsibility.

Even the aquawiz -- after reading up on user experience it seems that it needs, or suggests, calibration with a hanna checker once a week. And there are anecdotal reports of some manufacturing issues where if the unit gets bumped or jostled the ph probe goes out of whack.

Hanna checker has been good to me. I guess I'll wait a little longer.

 

[Deleted member 20245]

Hanna works and if you’re just testing for alk, it’s less than 5min from start to finish. However, it’s not as cool as my all new Alk/Ca/Mg tester — just released today with matching colors! lol