The Hanna Marine Monitor is the kind of device we’ve been dreaming of for so many years we can’t even believe that it’s real. For just $250 the Hanna Marine Monitor will keep an eye on the three pillars of marine aquarium chemistry – no not calcium, magnesium and alkalinity but the much more paramount values of pH, temperature and salinity which govern every aspect of aquatic biology.
As we’ve seen from many other new and incumbent players in the monitoring space you’re lucky to get just temperature and pH or conductivity for two hundred dollars – heck the Neptune Systems salinity probe costs $200 on its own! So the fact that Hanna was able to squeeze all this functionality for a very reasonable sum with a large and bright LCD screen that displays all the parameters at once is really a home run for Hanna and reefers who care about the fundamentals of saltwater chemistry.
As mentioned in the video the Hanna Marine Monitor is practically tailor made for use on saltwater mixing vats so you can always know the salinity of your newly mixed seawater in your preferred units be they specific gravity, parts per thousand or PSU. Having at a glance visual reporting of salinity, temperature and pH is incredibly valuable and perhaps the only feature that might leave something to be desired is some kind of local or cloud logging of values to track them over time.
However if you look at your reef tanks as much as we do you can quickly get a feel for the highs and lows of pH throughout the day and if you want more guide-rails to any specific value you can set high and low alarms for each parameter. With an expected launch in early November we’re still more than a month away from seeing what kind of device the Hanna Marine Monitor really is to use on a daily basis, for a reef tank or mixing vat, but with Hanna’s deep roots in scientific measurement and instrumentation we have no doubt it will excel in the accuracy department.
