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.