Best Water Test Kit For Shrimp Tank

I’ve probably said this thousand times in this site already… Water parameters are the most important thing for keeping shrimps. If your water parameters aren’t right, then no matter what you do, your shrimps will not thrive, or even worse, they will die.

If you don’t give any food to your shrimps for a week, nothing will happen. They’ll be perfectly fine grazing the algae and biofilm. Even if the filtration doesn’t work for a week, your shrimps won’t die (that doesn’t mean you should keep the tank without any filtration. Fix any filtration issue as soon as possible).

However, if the water parameters aren’t right, all of your shrimp colony can die within a week. So, I hope you’ve understood the importance of water parameters in a shrimp tank.

For keeping the right water parameter, we need to measure the parameters first. I’ll explain everything you need to measure the water parameters in this article.

First, for your better understanding, I want to measure the water parameters into two categories:

  • Primary: Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrate, etc.
  • Secondary: pH, TDS, GH, & KH, Temperature.

As you can guess, the primary parameters are more important to check first than the secondary ones. However, that doesn’t mean you should not care about the secondary ones. I just meant to give the primary parameters #1 priority.

Checking The Primary Water Parameters

The good thing is, with just one kit, you can check all the primary water parameters. If you are serious about shrimp keeping, I’ll highly suggest investing on this water test it. It will increases your success rate in shrimp keeping by many folds.

I am talking about the API Master Test Kit. With this single kit, you can measure the following water parameters:

  • Ammonia
  • Nitrite
  • Nitrate
  • pH
  • High Range pH

You’ll get the following items with the kit:

  • 7 bottles of testing solution
  • 4 glass tubes with cap
  • 1 color card

I can’t stress enough how important it is to check these water parameters. So, if you have the budget, definitely get this API Master Test Kit.

Checking The Secondary Water Parameters

The secondary parameters are also very important to check. Here’s how you can check each of them:

pH & TDS:

If you buy the API FreshwaterMaster Test Kit, there is no need to buy a seperate pH test meter. You can measure the pH with that.

However, if you don’t want to buy the master test kit for any reason and only want a pH meter, you can check out this one. [You can also measure TDS with this meter!]

GH & KH:

With this GH & KH Test Kit, you can measure both the GH & KH of your shrimp tank water. There is no need to buy two separate test kits. Certainly a handy test kit that will help you a long way!

Temperature:

If you want to get the correct temperature reading of your shrimp tank, I’ll highly suggest this digital aquarium thermometer. It is cheap yet very reliable! It will show you the temperature in digital reading so that you know exactly what is going on in the tank!

Preferable Water Parameter Ranges For Shrimps

Now that we know what test kits we need to measure the water parameters, we’ll also have to know about the correct water parameter ranges for each type of shrimps.

Here’s a table that will make everything easy for you:

Water ParametersNeo-CaridinaTiger (Caridina)Crystal/Bee (Caridina)Sulawesi
Temperature (Celcius)21 – 2421 – 2421 – 2426 – 29
pH6.5 – 7.56 – 75.8 – 6.87.5 – 8.5
GH (ppm)6 – 84 – 84 – 64 – 6
KH (ppm)1 – 4 2 – 60 – 12 – 4
TDS (ppm)150 – 250120 – 220100 – 180200 – 260

NB 1: The Ammonia and Nitrite should be as low as possible (preferably 0 ppm). With time, the amount of nitrate will gradually buildup in the tank. That’s why we perform weekly or bi-weekly water changes to keep the amount of Nitrate in check.

NB 2: The temperature range mentioned in the table is not concrete. Breeders have successfully bred shrimps in other temperature ranges too. However, it is not recommended to deviate more than 2-3 degrees from the mentioned range. Also, in the case of temperature, it is more important to be consistent than striking the ideal range.

Types Of Freshwater Shrimps

Knowing what type of shrimp you have is extremely important for keeping them successfully. If you don’t know what type of shrimp you have, the table below will help you figure that out:

Neo-CaridinaTiger (Caridina)Crystal/Bee (Caridina)Sulawesi
Red CherryTangerine TigersPandasGlaubrechti
SakuraOrange Eyed SeriesBlue BoltsHolthuisi
Fire RedYellow King KongCrystal Red ShrimpLanceolata
Painted Fire RedAura BlueCrystal Black ShrimpLingkonae
Bloody MaryTiger Shadow PandaLoehae
SnowballsYellow King KongsMasapi
Blue DiamondBlack King KongsParvula
Blue JellyRed King KongsProfundicola
Blue DreamPintosLake Poso
Blue VelvetGolden BeeMalili, etc.
ChocolateSnow White
CarbonSuper Red
Black RoseAmano Shrimp
OrangeBabaulti
24K Yellow GoldenBumblebee 
Green JadePinokio (Pinocchio)

Different Shrimps & Their Ideal Water Parameters

different shrimps' ideal water parameters infographic

Want to get a printable version of this infographic? Click here! [If you want to use this infographic on your website, please link back to this post as the source!]