Where'd The CO2 Go?

I don't know! (Thanks Ween!)

Seriously, though. So I decided to finally get off my butt and make some 4 degree KH water to retry the whole drop checker thing. I believe I did a pretty good job of getting it as close as I could, but that means something like within plus or minus 0.5 degrees. I wasn't really willing to (nor did I have enough distilled water to) do the measuring in big batches, that is several test tubes worth of water so that a drop was closer to a quarter of a degree or something.

Anyway, I looked up the amount of baking soda it takes to do this, and it turns out to be 1 teaspoon per 50 LITERS! Um, that's very little baking soda in 0.1 liters. So I literally sprinkled whatever stuck to my fingers in my Nalgene bottle. I actually did a pretty good job, and got it to 6 degrees KH by that method. I then added enough water to dilute it down to 4 degrees as best I could.

I added two drops of pH indicator to my plastic doo-hickey, and then filled it the rest of the way with my "special" water. It turned blue like it was supposed to, but after placing it in the aquarium, I found it didn't change color, much less the color I wanted (green).

As a sanity check, I checked the pH of the aquarium, and was disturbed/disappointed to find it to be a solid 7.8. Thinking that perhaps the KH had increased, I found it to be 13 dKH; higher than the expected 9 dKH, but according to the calculator, it only adds up to a paltry 6 ppm CO2. That is not good. In fact it's quite sad. I have not yet figured out why it is so, but I'm going to try looking again tomorrow after the CO2 comes on, but before the lights come on.