Hi Everyone and welcome to the channel! In this video, we'll be taking a look at the
Vivosun pH and tds meters. This is a number one seller on Amazon- very popular product,
but there's a lot of one-star reviews and people saying they can't calibrate the product. We're
gonna open these products up and try and calibrate them ourselves and I will show you guys just how
easy or hard it is, and let you know if this is a product worth buying. Opening things up here,
the pH meter comes with three buffering solutions that are gonna help us calibrate this product
and both meters come with a carrying case and instructions. Step one in calibration for the
pH meter is to get yourself some distilled water. Fortunately for me, I do have a water distiller,
but I could see this being a little upsetting if I had to go buy some. The calibration instructions
say to get three containers with 250 milliliters each of distilled water. We need to add each
packet of the buffering solutions to its own glass of water. We'll need to stir it until the
particles are completely dissolved in the water and now finally we should be ready to calibrate.
The instructions say to first rinse the meter off in the distilled water. Now we can turn this bad
boy on and insert it into our cup with the 6.86 pH solution. If we hold down that calibrate button,
the screen will eventually blink and it will lock in on 6.86 as the pH reading. We can then
repeat this process for the 4.0 and 9.1 8 pH solutions we just created. This all seems really
straightforward and easy, but it's actually a pretty dicey calibration process. The back of
these buffering solutions say that the pH will be different depending on the temperature of the
water we have mixed it in. So if we actually want to calibrate this pH meter we need to temperature
control all of this water to 25 degrees Celsius. If it's not 25 degrees Celsius,
we're calibrating to the wrong pH. There's really no chance I would be able to do this all correctly
and calibrate my pH meter perfectly. That said, it's gonna be relatively accurate but we're not
gonna have accuracy down to that hundredths of a decimal point level. The TDS meter is
a little more straightforward, you can turn this on and put it in water and it will instantly read
the temperature and the TDS, or total dissolved solids. I have it in distilled water here and it's
reading zero and when I move it to tap water, it gives me a higher rating- somewhere in the
low 100's. This makes sense and the temperature ratings were consistent with other thermometers
I used. One thing of note is this calibration button on the TDS meter- there's no mention in
the instructions of how to use it or if you need to, but the button is there. And that's really
all that is involved in the calibration process for these products. On the pro side of things,
these meters are cheap and they work. On the con side, it's going to be very difficult to
perfectly calibrate your pH meter and you only get one set of the buffer solutions,
so you cannot recalibrate later. At the end of the day these meters are gonna do just fine at reading
a hydroponic reservoir or maybe your pool to check the pH or TDS of those things, but if you're
trying to win the Nobel Prize and doing accurate science, you're gonna need a better instrument.
Simple as that. Overall, I definitely recommend these products for the average person, average
household use. It's gonna work very well and as I mentioned it's quite cheap. Thanks a lot for
watching this videom I hope it helps you decide if this product is right for you or helps you to
calibrate your own pH meter. If you appreciated the information in here, please smash that like
button below as well as the Amazon link to where you can find these products. Thanks for watching!