Basic Water Testing
What’s in your water? Water is known as the universal solvent and dissolves an awful lot of “stuff”. If I were to take two 12 oz glasses of water and add a teaspoon of sodium chloride, a teaspoon of potassium nitrate, and a teaspoon of ammonium sulfate to one of the glasses and stir it well, you would not be able to tell the mixture from the pure water.
The purpose of this portion of the project is to have you or your group actually go out and perform some basic water testing parameters to help you find out some of what is in your water. The best part of this is that the laboratory is now your local lake or stream, and you get a chance to be outside enjoying your local watershed while doing the testing.
For this portion of the project we recommend that you use a low cost water monitoring kit that can be ordered directly from Flinn Scientific or we can order it for you and have it sent directly to the address of your choice. This kit uses water testing materials developed by LaMotte and is also used by Earth Force’s Project GREEN.
The kit contains materials to test for the following:
Ø dissolved oxygen
Ø Biochemical Oxygen Demand
Ø nitrates
Ø pH
Ø phosphates
Ø temperature
Ø turbidity
If you are interested in having ML & SA order this for you, please enclose a check made out to Michigan Lake & Stream Associations for $40.00 and please download and fill out the form:
If you are interested in having ML & SA order this for you, please enclose a check made out to Michigan Lake & Stream Associations for $40.00 and please download and fill out the form:
Water Monitoring Kit Order Form: MS Word Format or PDF Format
The Water Monitoring Kit Order form is in MS Word or PDF 7.0. Use the MS Word format if you are going to fill out the form electronically and e-mail as an attachment. Use the PDF Format if you are going to fill out the form by hand and mail it in.
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@Copyright 2005 Michigan Lakes and Streams Association