Drop Based Borate Test Kit.

[rcy100]

I just received a new borate test kit that is drop based. It's cheap, the instructions are easy and I'm guessing it's more accurate than a strip (I've never used a strip, that's why I'm guessing). The kit utilizes some of the reagents one would already have in any kit comparable to something like a K2006.

I dont know if I can post the link or not - mods can you let me know, thanks.

I was also trying to contact Waterbear specifically about this kit to get his opinion (I think he was an early borate adopter if I recall correctly), but don't have the capability to private message. Maybe he can contact me if he reads this.

[chem geek]

You posted about this kit in this thread (http://www.troublefreepool.com/new-borate-drop-test-at-piscines-apollo-vs-test-strip-t34664.html) at TFP where I speculated on how it might work. This kit doesn't compete with the K-2006 and the Amazon links to Amato that help The PoolForum don't include a borate test strip so I don't see a problem with you posting the link here. It does look like an interesting kit with clever reuse of some K-2006 reagents (R-0009 acid and R-0010 base; also R-0007 chlorine neutralizer) plus a couple of new reagents S-0009 and S-0010.

Since the kit is sold by a vendor in Canada, I wonder if importing it into the U.S. will have the high duty problems the Taylor kits have going the other way. Though the expense of the Taylor kits going to Canada is from the exclusive distributor Lowry & Associates, their high price is to cover the high costs for the paperwork/duties to import "hazardous" chemicals in the kit. The two added reagents in the kit are likely just Bromocresol green pH indicator dye and mannitol (a sugar substitute).

[waterbear]

I tend to agree with chem geek as to what is in the kit. It is functionally going to give you the equivalent of the old (and I believe discontinued) Proteam borate test kit and will be the indicator dye (bromthymol blue, not bromcresol green) and mannitol. The test is time consuming and I really feel the LaMotte strips profise enough precision for borate testing in a pool (having tested MANY times with both the Proteam kit and the LaMotte strips and gotten resutls that were "close enough for government work" every time!

Perhaps giroup01 can comment on this. I know he has had some links with the company selling this but his sig now indicates he is retired.

However, it seems that private messages have been disabled in the fourm so I cannot contact him even though he is currently online.

[giroup01]

In a nutshell, the Proteam titration is a base-demand test, you’re increasing the pH of the sample to a certain point (in this case 7.6). It’s the opposite of the TA test in your Taylor kit where you’re lowering the pH (to 4.5). It uses a 20 mL sample size. 1 drop of titrant = 2 ppm as boron.

The Proteam kit has 4 reagents:

PS1 is sulfuric acid (an acid),
PS2 is bromothymol blue (a pH indicator, range 6.0 to 7.6),
PS3 is sodium hydroxide (a base) and
PS4 is mannitol (a sweetener, also known as a sugar alcohol).

To begin the Proteam test you need to adjust the pH of the sample to 7.6, this is done with PS1 (the acid), PS3 (the base) and PS2 (the pH indicator). The first blue color you get indicates pH 7.6.

When that’s done you add mannitol to the sample. Mannitol reacts with boric acid and forms a strong acid that drops the pH of the sample – hence the yellow color you observe if there is boron present.

From there you add the base drop wise (PS3) until you get back up to pH 7.6. That’s the second blue color you observe. The number of drops used to get there multiplied by 2 gives you the boron concentration in parts per million.

In your Taylor test kit you’ll discover that reagent R-0009 is sulfuric acid (like PS1) and reagent R-0010 is sodium hydroxide (like PS2). These Taylor reagents are more concentrated than Proteam’s counterparts, we therefore needed to find an “appropriate” sample volume and a corresponding drop equivalency . All you’re missing are mannitol and bromothymol blue, which we supply.

The biggest sample volume available with the Taylor gear is 44 mL with the comparator bloc of the K-2000 series kits. We wanted to keep things very simple, we didn’t want to get into diluting sample with DI water, didn’t want a sample volume of say 52.6 mL and things like that.

Testing with many different standardized boron solutions (and many pools using borates) were made with both the Proteam kit and the Taylor reagents. The equivalency of “1 drop = 4.5 ppm” was determined that way – it comes very very close (to within a drop) to Proteam’s kit.

Luckily, borates dosage is not critical, you’ll hear anything from 30 to 50 to 80 ppm.

The reagents supplied with our borates drop kit allow you to perform a titration test for borates using equipment you already have, so the cost of the kit is very very low, cheaper than the strips, and you get much better precision.

Using the popular SpeedStir stirrer speeds up the testing quite a bit.

[waterbear]

Thank you giroup01. Next question. The borate test add on can be shipped to the US, correct?

[giroup01]

I don't see why not, it's a low-value shipment (about $8 US), no hazmat, nothing toxic.

[rcy100]

The test is time consuming and I really feel the LaMotte strips profise enough precision for borate testing in a pool (having tested MANY times with both the Proteam kit and the LaMotte strips and gotten resutls that were "close enough for government work" every time!

Perhaps giroup01 can comment on this. I know he has had some links with the company selling this but his sig now indicates he is retired.

However, it seems that private messages have been disabled in the fourm so I cannot contact him even though he is currently online.

I did this test today, and it was not time consuming at all. The colour changes were easy to see and the instructions that came with the kit were concise and easy to follow.

I didn't even think to use my speed stir which I received at the same time. Oh well. Test indicated only 36ppm (I suspected I was low). I'm about to add three boxes of Mule Team and will retest in a couple days. This won't show accuracy, but it will show if the test kit works properly, as after adding three boxes, I should definitely get a higher reading when I test again.

[rcy100]

Here is the kit

http://piscines-apollo.com/cubecart/index.php/borates/ap-borates/p_129.html

and the instructions...you can see they are quite simple.

http://piscines-apollo.com/docs/ap_borates_en_ins.pdf

[chem geek]

I just bought the kit for shipment to the U.S. While the kit itself was $9.99 CAD, the shipping was $13.41 CAD. This was basically $24. It would be better to buy some other things to combine in the shipment, but I just thought I'd get this kit right now as I'm well-stocked with everything else I need for testing.

[PoolDoc]

Giroup,

Is the Piscines-Apollo store you? What happened to Lowry?

[rcy100]

I emailed him to see what was happening with Piscines Apollo (since it says he's retired in his posts) and thankfully, he's decided to postpone the retirement. He just needs to update his signature (or tag or whatever it's called).

[rcy100]

I did this test today, and it was not time consuming at all. The colour changes were easy to see and the instructions that came with the kit were concise and easy to follow.

I didn't even think to use my speed stir which I received at the same time. Oh well. Test indicated only 36ppm (I suspected I was low). I'm about to add three boxes of Mule Team and will retest in a couple days. This won't show accuracy, but it will show if the test kit works properly, as after adding three boxes, I should definitely get a higher reading when I test again.

Well, I'm impatient, so I went ahead and tested a couple hours after adding three boxes of Mule Team and 3.5 litres of muriatic acid. Now reading 46, so the borate test kit definitely does what it's supposed to do. My 10 year old daughter helped (the Speedstir was a big hit!!) so that should give you an indication of how easy the test is.

[waterbear]

I did this test today, and it was not time consuming at all. The colour changes were easy to see and the instructions that came with the kit were concise and easy to follow.



I was referring to the Proteam drop based kit where every drop of titrant is equal to 2 ppm boron (as opposed to 4.5 ppm boron for this kit and the Taylor acid and base demand reagents) so the test is about as time consuming as a calcium hardness titiration. When compared with the LaMotte borate strips (which Piscines-Apolo also sells), which take 15 seconds, it is a big time difference for not really that much more precision since the drop test is not being done with a pH meter as I will now explain. The color changes for bromthymol blue are not easy to determine as they go through the intermediate point and it is very important in this test tot only add enough sodium hydroxide to bring the pH to 7.6 (when the blue first appears). You cannot "add one more drop to make sure the color does not change anymore" since that will give you an inaccurate final titration and if you did not go all the way to the blue color but stopped at an intermediate endpoint you will also get inaccurate results. That is why this test is done in the laboratory with a pH meter and not an indicator dye.

[giroup01]

But don’t forget, the Proteam test requires that you determine a color change in 20 mL of water.

The color change is much easier to determine in our test because you are looking down from the top into a more or less narrow cell containing 44 mL of water. And the cell has a white dot at the bottom that increases contrast and facilitates viewing. Because the viewpath is longer this increases the color intensity and makes the color change much easier to spot.

Similarly, in Taylor’s phosphate test, you are required to look down from the top of a (5 mL) long and narrow test cell to determine the sample color. One would be hard pressed to determine the color of that 5 mL sample if it was, say, in a beaker.

44 mL of Taylor Standard Solution R-7062 (pH 7.6 Standard Solution) with BTB produces the same hue as the endpoint obtained (and shown) in our instructions.

[rcy100]

I've done this test a few times now on my pool and all I can say is I find it quite easy (the speed stir makes it even easier) and the colour change (for me anyway) was easily discernable. I've never tried borate strips, so I can't compare, but if the borate strips are anything like the standard strips (i.e. hard to read) I'll gladly keep this drop based test.

However, as everyone is quick to point out, absolute accuracy is not essential with borates, so whatever floats your boat when it comes to testing is good.

[waterbear]

The LaMotte borate strips are very easy to read with distinctive color changes. The Aquachek strips are next to impossible to read. The Proteam kit is very tricky to do right. I am going to try the test with the 44 ml sample and the acid and base demand reagents and see how it goes. (I already have quite a bit of mannitol and bromthymol blue on hand since I have more than one Proteam borate test kit.)
However, like I said before, this particular test is usually done with a pH meter since it is very easy to overshoot the step when you just neutralize the acid used to get rid of bicarbonates in the water (and the sample is usually heated at that point to make sure all the CO2 is gone) so you are only titrating boron and not carbonic acid. Proteam took a novel approach in designing this test kit (and I am sure John Garvin, who holds the orginal patents on borates in pool, had a hand in it).

The trick to see the titrations precision is how repeatable are the results on the same sample. I have not found the borate titration as repeatable as the LaMotte strips.

[chem geek]

I received the Piscines Apollo borates test and tried it out in my pool today. I can see what waterbear is talking about with regard to not having the same sort of "keep adding drops until there is no color change, then do not count the last drop" problem, but I tried the test going past the first transition to blue in several different amounts and basically so long as you end up at the same transition point in the first part of the test (before adding the powder) and the last part of the test, then the results are very consistent. That is, if you stop adding drops when the sample "first turns blue" as indicated in the instructions, then you get the same result as when you go past that by some fixed number of drops to get, say, a deeper blue, so long as you do the same thing in both parts of the test. It does seem to me to be repeatable to within one drop as advertised since I did the test 5 times and got the same result (within one drop) -- again, so long as I stopped at the same point in both parts of the test. The transition to blue is like most other dye tests, not completely definitive in one drop, but it does seem pretty clear within two so should be easy enough to pick one's transition point to be consistent for the second part of the test (i.e. if you go further in the first part to a darker more distinct blue, just be sure to do that later as well).

[waterbear]

Exactly! The problem is that you do not really know the acutal borate reading. You can get repeatable results as long as you stop at the same transition point but where is the PROPER place to stop to get an accurate boron reading? The strips might not have the same precision but the resutls are more accurate in terms of boron levels, IMHO.

[chem geek]

The point I was trying to make was that it doesn't matter exactly which point you stop for the transition so long as you stop in the same place in both parts of the test where that transition is seen. I got the same borate result (same number of drops in the second part of the test) regardless of the transition point I used (just barely blue vs. a more solid blue, for example) so long as I went to the same point in both parts of the test. My five tests even at different transition points all gave me the same borate result within one drop (actually, 4 of the 5 were exactly the same number of drops). Basically, if you go "too far" in the first part of the test, then it is exactly compensated in the second part of the test if you go to the same visible point since what you are trying to measure is the delta that happens after you add the mannitol. The exact transition point from which you start in the first part of the test and end in the second part of the test isn't important (since even a hint of blue is beyond that needed to measure the borates properly).

[waterbear]

so long as I went to the same point in both parts of the test. .

and it is a subjective color that you are trying to achieve by memory. I never said that this test was bad, just that it was difficult to do properly and can be error prone and is time consuming compared to the LaMotte strips..