Using test strips in your float tank – DSP 43

Some people swear by tests strips. Others don’t. What’s the right way to do it for float tanks? Luckily we have two people who have learned, in frustratingly specific detail, everything there is to know about testing float tank water and how.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is, “Why do some people swear by test strips and other people recommend against them?”

Ashkahn: Okay, so I guess, what is out there other than test strips.

Graham: Let’s say what a test strip is. That might be good. We’re talking about testing your water quality here, and a test strip is a little strip that has pads on the end with chemicals in them that you dip in there to get a reading.

Ashkahn: Yeah, they come in little bottles, usually, and on the back of the bottle is like…

Graham: Let’s talk about what a bottle is for a second.

Ashkahn: All right. It’s a container that you put stuff into. They have a color chart on the back of the bottle, so you dip it in the liquid and you pull it out and you compare the color to what it says on the bottle and that gives you your reading. They make test strips for pretty much everything, I guess, really: pH, alkalinity, chlorine, bromine.

Graham: Pregnancy.

Ashkahn: So yeah, there’s lots of test strips out there and they’re probably the most common thing people know about, just because it’s what people use if you have a pool at home or a hot tub at home or something. Like people in residential settings, that’s what they’re using. They’re kind of like the most straightforward thing you could have, right? It’s literally like dip this in, look at the color. So you see a lot of test strips out there and then you hear about people saying maybe you shouldn’t be using test strips.

Graham: Yeah, and the thought behind that is that it’s one of the most subjective ways to test your water quality or your water metrics, and subjective in the sense that once you dip it in the water and hold it out, you’re now gauging your visual acuity against the colors on these tabs and the color on the bottle.

And there’s a saying in the water aquatic health world of, “Oh, is your pH not high enough and you’re using a test strip? Just hold it out of the water for another couple of seconds. It’ll be fine,” which is it keeps changing color even after you take it out of the water. So there is this sense where if you’re not hitting it at the exact right time, in the exact right light, and your eyes are good, then there’s a lot of variability there.

Ashkahn: Also, often test strips are not as accurate just by themselves to begin with as some of these other things we’ll talk about in a second, so it’s kind of all those things combined make it for not being the most reliable thing. They’re not the most precise tools to begin with and then on top of that there’s a lot of subjectivity in terms of your color perception, the lighting in the room, things like that, and there’s some subjectivity in terms of how long you are waiting to actually decide, “Now I’m taking this reading.” So all those things put together make it a less certain testing regimen than some of the other stuff.

So what’s the other stuff? They have these other test kits that have often just bottles of these reagents, as they call them, that are just chemicals that do a lot of the same stuff. They change colors. A lot of this is about color changing. So you’ll take a sample of your water, for example, and squirt 10 drops of some bottle in there, it’ll turn the whole thing green and then you’ll put like five drops of something else in there and that’ll turn it a different color, and then you have to put 10 more drops, or you count how many drops it takes to turn the liquid back to clear. That’s like some ways that you see this.

Every test kit’s different and they have their own slightly different ways and colors and number of things you’re dropping in, but at the end of the day it’s a lot of that. You’re either getting to some sort of end point that’s a lot clearer than testing a color against something, and sometimes it is actually testing a color, right? Like some of these nicer test kits, you’ll put something in, then you’ll compare the color, the liquid turns to a color on the side of a bottle or something like that.

Graham: Especially I feel like I’ve seen that a lot with those ones where you crush the tablets into the water and wait for it to change color. So there’s still a little bit of visual checking in that case too.

Ashkahn: I mean, you hear the same complaints about those. The testing itself, I think, is more accurate to begin with, but it’s still has the same problem of human beings having imprecise color perception, especially relative to each other. Some people just see slightly different colors, or the color temperature in the room that you’re in can adjust for things like that. I mean, the newer stuff that you see coming out is kind of electronic devices that basically do that.

Graham: That also look at the color and compare it for you.

Ashkahn: They just look at the color. Yeah, they’re just better at looking at color.

Graham: You’re just using robot eyes instead of your own fallible human eyes.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and it’s pretty much when you hear about electronic testing systems, you often think they’re something that’s like sampling the water in some crazy electronic way, but often they’re just literally shooting a beam of light into water and then deciding the color on their own, which is better — it’s a more precise way, or at least a more reliable or consistent way of getting a reading from something than doing it yourself.

Graham: A little word of warning is that we’ve had just a ton of trouble getting anything that’s kind of robotic-driven like that, like a spectrometer, to read the float tanks, just because the density of the salt water affects the light beams going through it in a way that you don’t have for regular water.

Ashkahn: Perhaps that, or perhaps just the chemistry to begin with was not working correctly.

Graham: Yeah, who knows? We don’t actually know. It’s all conjecture.

Ashkahn: It wasn’t the colors they was expecting, yeah. So, I don’t know, you’ll hear different things out there too.

A lot of places won’t even allow you to use test strips in a commercial setting. They’ll require that you use some sort of actual reagent test kit, and then we hear of some places where test strips is what they recommend, but that’s way more seldom than we hear the other way that you have to use a test kit.

At the end of the day, probably something to factor in is whatever testing thing your health department is using, like if you have someone coming in and inspecting your float tank, I’d buy the exact same test kit the inspectors are coming in to test with. And more times than not, that’s one of these reagent test kits than it is a test strip sort of situation, for sure.

Graham: We could keep going forever on water testing stuff. It gets to be a very deep, deep, dark rabbit hole but, for now, hopefully, that’ll at least explain some of the difference between test strips and what some of the other devices are doing and why people maybe are a little more wary of test strips.

Again, even given the subjective nature of a lot of these tests, test strips do seem to be on that far end of subjectivity. There’s nothing more subjective than test strips other than just staring at your float tank solution.

Ashkahn: Just taking a guess.

Graham: Yeah, exactly. Going on your hunch.

So, thanks for tuning into today’s episode. And, as always, you can submit your own ideas and questions on our website at floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

Ashkahn: Thanks everybody.

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