• Folks, if you've recently upgraded or renewed your annual club membership but it's still not active, please reach out to the BOD or a moderator. The PayPal system has a slight bug which it doesn't allow it to activate the account on it's own.

Calibrating refractometer

njtiger24 aquariums

njtiger24 aquariums

Officer Emeritus
Article Contributor
Well I will fully admit when I calibrated mine I used RO water but I read that not correct. I ordered calibration solution which gave me the same number a my RO but that could had just been lucky.
 
Jeffery Kilpatrick

Jeffery Kilpatrick

I had mine calibrated by my lfs, now when I test with RO water it reads below the scale. My water is from a well and team through my RO unit so I don't see why it wouldn't read zero.. why does it read below the scale? So now I'm questioning my salinity levels. Should I just reset it to zero base off my RO water?

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk
 
Martin Riggs

Martin Riggs

Distilled water for 1.000 SG. I would pick up some new sealed calibration fluid. I have some that been sitting for quite some time and it's way off. 1.030 SG it reads when should be 1.025 SG.
 
art13

art13

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Don't use ro water, you want to use calibration solution as close to the salinity that you shooting for that you can get. I used to water on mine at first, couldn't figure out why my coral were slowly dying, come to find out my salinty was 1.023 after correcting with the proper calibrating fluid. Corrected the salinity and my coral came back
 
art13

art13

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
For fish it won't matter, coral it will, if they are selling coral they either got lucky or they aren't in the tank long enough to really effect the coral, mine declined over 3 months. A bottle of 35ppt solution from brs is like 8 bucks, it's cheap and can save you a headache
 
E

EricP

I have done mine using both ro and calibration solution. I did them both side by side. Exact same reading after both. Calibration solution is cheap enough though so I suggest using it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top