HTH1276 Swimming Pool Care 6 Way Test Strips, Swimming Pool Water Chemical Tester, 30 Strips

These are garbage. Chlorine and PH are unreadable. The color fades from dark in the center of the strip to white as you move outward. Am I supposed to average the color variation (rhetorical question). I then used the HTH app and it told me to drain my pool as the CYA was over 300.The water is 30 days old and I have only used 5 pucks so the math doesn't work out. It wasn't a bad batch. I had purchased HTH strips before and threw them out for this very reason.I used the AquaCheck strips and everything checked out okay - 4ppm free CL and CYA a little low.

We always check the pool with a chemical kit but this is a quick verification we've read it right. Also a quick way to know if you need to look further instead of weekly routine.

The printed color guide for reading the strip doesn't match the colors the strip itself will turn. For example, the chlorine guide ranges from yellow to dark red, and I regularly measure bright purple. What does that mean? The next one down is very pale relative to the guide, and only shows that amount of color very briefly before then fading away. I'm going to trash these and go back to the Clorox strips I used to use.

They are fine however, some of the colors fade into each other when the water is on it. The app is easy to use. I feel like the color fading my affect the reading however. I don’t know if anything could be done to prevent this from happening.

A large part of the draw for me was the promise that I could take a picture of the stick using the HTH app on my phone to automatically interpret the colors. I have found this to be completely unreliable. The app "works", but the values returned for the various water parameters are way out of bounds.