With so many news stories surfacing about pool water and/or drinking water not having adequate disinfectant levels many health officials have started pushing for increased testing and they don’t mean testing for chlorine residuals with test strips or liquid test kits which both require testers to match colors to get readings.

Rather than trust test personnel to use established methods of chlorine testing such as the Taylor FAS DPD Test Kit and/or the recently EPA Approved SenSafe Free Chlorine Water Check product, some folks want to remove as much subjectivity from the chlorine testing process as possible… and that means using meters to test chlorine residuals.

One example of a meter that some folks have turned to goes by the name of Extech (CL200) Exstik Direct Digital Reading Chlorine Meter and you can see a picture of that meter to the left.

The Extech CL200 Chlorine Testing Meter tests only for TOTAL chlorine, uses DPD as its reagent, requires roughly 2 minutes for testing, stores up to 15 readings internally, and detects total chlorine levels down to 0.01ppm (mg/L).

Extech, the manufacturer, claims the EPA has deemed the meter, with its associated DPD testing method, acceptable for wastewater compliance monitoring of Total Chlorine.

From what we can see on the IsoPureWater web site, this meter cannot used generic DPD tablets, DPD powder pillows, or DPD liquids designed for 10 mL sample sizes… and that means having fewer shopping options when the time comes to acquire replacement DPD reagents.

Not necessarily a show-stopper by any stretch of the imagination since a pack of 100 DPD reagent tablets for this meter costs under $30.

Definitely keep this meter in mind should you need a fast, compact meter for testing total chlorine levels in water.