Tried that chemtrail water test kit from Amazon and got a weird result

I bought a $25 water testing kit last month to check the rainwater collecting in my backyard barrel. The instructions said to match the color strip after 2 minutes, but the sample turned orange instead of the yellow they showed in the manual. My neighbor claims it's from jet exhaust mixing with moisture, but the kit's fine print says it could be pollen or dust. Has anyone else had a kit react differently than expected, or is this just normal tap water shenanigans?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryan7191mo ago

Yeah that orange thing happened to me too with a similar kit from a different brand. I was testing the water from my rain barrel after a long dry spell and it went straight to orange instead of the light yellow the chart showed. I freaked out and brought a sample to my buddy who works at the county water lab, he tested it with their equipment and said it was just a ton of pine pollen and dust that settled in the barrel. The kit's fine print is probably right about that, the color change can be triggered by organic stuff floating around not just chemicals. I stopped worrying about it after that and just started filtering the water through a cloth before testing, fixed the issue completely.

oliver_mitchell1mo ago

Yeah that part about pine pollen and dust triggering it rings a bell, I actually read a study online a while back that said natural organic matter like leaves and pollen can mess with those colorimetric tests way more than people realize. The cloth filter trick is smart, I started doing something similar after a guy on a homesteading forum said he runs his samples through a coffee filter first and it cleared up his false positives completely. So yeah you're right, the kits are probably fine, it's just the gunk in the water that throws them off.