How the Aquarino KH measures
2.1 Measuring without reagents
The Aquarino KH uses a patented method to track the changes in your alkalinity, taking as its basis a reference alkalinity that you provide beforehand.
In practice this has two consequences that are worth half of this manual:
- Since no reagent is consumed, measuring costs nothing — you can measure every hour, every day, indefinitely.
- Since the method starts from a reference you provide, measurement quality depends directly on the quality of that information. That is why calibration gets a chapter of its own and is the most important step of the installation.
2.2 The measurement cycle
Each measurement takes about 30 minutes, and you follow the progress live, as a percentage and a time remaining, on the home screen.
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Preparation | The internal chambers are emptied and rinsed |
| Collection | A fresh sample is drawn from your aquarium |
| Aeration | The chambers are aerated until they stabilise |
| Reading | The probe takes the required readings |
| Result | KH is calculated, recorded and displayed |
| Close-out | Alerts are sent and the correction for the period is decided |
Throughout the cycle the equipment keeps responding normally in the app, and your calcium reactor carries on with the plan set at the previous measurement — nothing sits idle waiting for the result.
2.3 What the measurement needs in order to work
Four conditions explain almost every case of unstable readings that reaches our support desk:
| Condition | Why |
|---|---|
| Equivalent aeration in both chambers | This is the most frequent one. The side valves should leave both chambers with strong, similar airflow. The acceptable minimum is around 5 mm of foam. |
| Clean chambers | Dirt, biofilm and settled organic matter change the reading progressively and silently. |
| Stable temperature | A sharp swing during the cycle shifts the result. Hence the recommendation not to install near a chiller. |
| A representative sample | The hose tip needs to sit in water that has already mixed with the rest of the system — not next to the balling dosing point, not in the detritus at the bottom. |
2.4 The pH probe: what actually matters
The pH probe is the most delicate part of the set, and the one that most affects confidence in the readings. Two things are commonly confused:
| What it is for | Needed to measure KH? | |
|---|---|---|
| Probe calibration (pH 7 and pH 10) | Displaying the real pH of your aquarium on screen and in the graph | No |
| Probe health (a 0 to 100% index) | Telling you whether the probe is still reliable — it considers signal noise, slope, offset and probe age | Yes, this is what counts |
In other words: you could never calibrate the probe and KH would still be measured. Without calibration, only the Tank pH field stays empty and the pH series is not recorded in the graph.