Recreonics AquaThority Blog - Swimming Pool Test Kits

WaterLink SpinTouch Lab – Your All-In-One Pool Water Test Kit

Sandy Bock — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 18:03:54 +0000

The importance of regular and accurate pool water chemistry testing cannot be overstated. Well-balanced swimming pool water chemistry not only ensures the health and safety of your guests, but also the efficiency of your facility’s equipment. However, since field testing for every chemical is time consuming and expensive, many aquatic facilities only regularly test chlorine and pH levels. While the correct balance of these properties makes the pool water safe for swimmers, imbalance of other chemicals in the water can lead to equipment failures, costing your facility more in repairs and replacements. That’s why we recommend the WaterLink SpinTouch Lab from LaMotte Company. This portable water testing system is easy to use and conducts 10 important tests in just 60 seconds.

Awarded NSF/ANSI Level 1 certification for its pH, free/combined chlorine, and cyanuric acid tests, LaMotte’s WaterLink SpinTouch Lab is engineered so that it can be used without specialized training. Simply inject one of the prefilled reagent disks with a 3-milliliter water sample, insert the disk into the photometer, and press start. All 10 tests will be done automatically—no more counting drops or time-consuming cleanup. Utilizing centrifugal fluidics photometry, the WaterLink SpinTouch is a precise machine that measures all your vital tests at the same time.

Each reagent spin disk is made with exactly the precise amount of reagent material in each of its compartments to perform all tests. Recreonics offers two LaMotte reagent disks. The #56-787 spin disk has the capacity to test for free and total chlorine, pH, bromine, calcium hardness, total alkalinity, cyanuric acid, copper, iron, and salt. The 56-789 tests for all of these parameters, along with phosphate. You will want to regularly test for phosphate if algae growth is a concern for your swimming pool or spa. Phosphates are harmless to swimmers but are a food source for algae and other plants and come from organic debris from swimmers, plant materials that blow into the pool, insects, and rain water. As such, phosphates tend to be a major concern for outdoor pools. While removing phosphates from the pool water is not guaranteed to prevent all algae growth, maintaining low levels of phosphate will reduce the likelihood of large breakouts and poor water quality.

All tests results can be viewed on the full-color touchscreen display or transferred into the WaterLink Solutions analysis program. WaterLink Solutions is an app compatible with both Apple IOS, PC, and Android devices. You can connect your WaterLink SpinTouch Lab to your computer, tablet, or mobile device via Bluetooth or USB-C. While you can read your results and store records on the device itself, the Solutions app provides an advanced data management system to assist with scheduling, organization, and chemical dosage planning.

Sites are the actual swimming pool or spa in this program.
You can connect the site to a property—the facility, hotel, park, etc. where the pool is located
And, also add contacts for the managers or individuals who need to be called once testing is complete or if there is an issue to flag.

This system allows you to build relationships between your data and create intelligent search controls to help your staff find exactly what you are looking for when reviewing your test records.

LaMotte’s WaterLink SpinTouch Lab has internal storage for up to 250 records while the WaterLink Solutions app can store an unlimited amount of data to its storage cloud. The app also allows you to view all test results for all sites in real time, with a color-coded flagging system that shows when a result is out of range, and will recommend chemical dosages for the specific chemistry required at a site. Any results entered manually are flagged with a special icon. WaterLink Solutions also lets you graph and chart your results, so you can manage trends in the water chemistry of your swimming pool or spa.

The WaterLink SpinTouch Lab kit comes with the photometer, USB cable with a wall adapter for charging, disk shield, meter check disk, three syringes, instruction manual and a durable, waterproof case. The meter check disk is a colored film, non-liquid disk used for checking the calibration of the photometer. It is recommended that you check and calibrate your WaterLink SpinTouch Lab at least once a month or more, depending on how many the amount of testing you do. The device is internet ready and can be calibrated and updated in the field with an internet connection. Reagent disks are sold separately.

WaterLink Spin Touch Lab and WaterLink Solutions app is the most advanced system for the accurate use of wet chemistry methods for pools and spas, achieving precision results without specialized training or time-consuming test and clean-up procedures.

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What’s in Your Swimming Pool Water? – Find Out With Palintest Technologies

Sandy Bock — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 15:04:44 +0000

Anyone who has worked with commercial swimming pools will know the importance of having clean and chemically balanced water. Regular and accurate testing of your pool’s water is crucial to maintaining your facility and preventing scale and stain formation, cloudy water, algae growth, and the corrosion of pool surfaces and equipment. But with so many chemicals and tests to be aware of – free and total chlorine, calcium hardness, alkalinity, pH, cyanuric acid to name a few – it can be difficult to know what kind of tool you need. Palintest offers some of the most accurate pool water testing devises thanks to years of engineering and refinement. Palintest calibrates their photometers using certified color standards set by National Physical Laboratory (NPL) standards and Palintest’s quality control team prepares certified standards for their products in their own lab.

In the 1950’s, Dr. Thomas Palin approached chemist and pharmaceutical wholesaler William & Simpson Ltd. in Newcastle, UK, to manufacture reagent tablets for his new method of testing water. Dr. Palin had developed breakpoint chlorination for water and the DPD colorimetric method for the determination of chlorine. DPD reagent tablets react with chlorine in the water to create that recognizable magenta color, the saturation of which reveals the chlorine levels in the water. This method was so effective that it became the standard determination method throughout the world and is still used today.

Palintest photometers use an internal light source and optical chamber to read the wavelength transmitted through the color created when the reagent tablet for a particular test is added to the pool water. Based on the principles of optical absorbance of light, and Beer’s Law, the measured absorbance and transmittance allow Palintest photometers to calculate the concentration of the parameter you are testing.

Palintest offers four basic water testing photometer models to meet the needs of your swimming pool. Each comes with starter pack of reagent tablets and the matching test tubes, test tube brush, reagents, and crushing rods for your particular model.

Palintest products aren’t just for testing chlorine, they also have the capability to test several other chemical levels in the water from alkalinity to zinc.

For the most basic pool testing we recommend the PoolTest 3 photometer. It is a quick and accurate 3-parameter instrument that is ideal for routine monitoring of chlorine, pH and cyanuric acid. The PoolTest 6 is a similar size to the PoolTest 3 but has the capacity to test alkalinity, calcium hardness and bromine in addition to chlorine, pH, and cyanuric acid. These are the 6 most important water quality tests. Both the PoolTest 3 and the PoolTest 6 must be purchased for either the standard (0-5ppm) or the extended (0-10ppm) ranges for chlorine. You cannot manually change the chlorine range of your photometer.

The PoolTest 9 is capable of analyzing three additional water quality tests for the proper management of your swimming pool and the PoolTest 25 offers the complete range of water quality testing. You can change the chlorine range of the PoolTest 9 and the PoolTest 25, and unlike the 3 and 6, which have a numeric based interface, the 9 and 25 are language based and allow you to change your on-screen prompts to English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Turkish and Mandarin (Chinese).

Another key difference between the PoolTest 3 and 6 photometers and the PoolTest 9 and 25 photometers is the number of tests the devices stores. The PoolTest 3 and 6 will store the last 10 test results in the device’s memory. However, the PoolTest 9 and 25 can store 500 and 1,000 test results, respectively, internally on the device. You can manually connect the device to a computer from the USB port, which also functions as a secondary power source in addition to the battery chamber, which uses 3 AA batteries.

So, when deciding on which Palintest photometer you should purchase, it really just comes down to how many specific tests you want to perform, how you want your test results and how many you want to keep on file. Recreonics carries all four models of Palintest photometers, including both the standard and extended version of the PoolTest 3 and the PoolTest 6. All Palintest photometers are IP67 waterproof rated and comes with a 2-year warranty.

You can also purchase replacement Palintest test reagent tablets and accessories such as test tubes, crushing rods, measuring syringes, and check standard sets from Recreonics.

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