Mood wrote:
Thanks for your advice. My tap water is alkaline off the scale of my pH kit,
over 7.6pH. The buffer, salt, and FloraPride treated water brings the
numbers to:
snip

I would recommend getting a high range pH kit which can test up into the
mid 8s. You might also want to get a fresh test kit if yours is more than
several years old. Also, test the pH both immediately after the tap and
then strongly aerate a sample and let it sit for 24 hours and test again.
Often there is a mix of gasses in the tap water which will affect the pH
measurements.

Also, what is the KH and GH out of the tap? The buffers may affect these
values so knowing the untreated numbers will be helpful. You said that you
had issues with the GH test kit. I assume this is the green/orange
titrated method. That one can be rather hard to read. I've often had to
measure a few times, putting an excess of drops in at first to see what
the final color should be. It's nowhere near as dramatically clear as the
blue/yellow KH titration test. You might wish to compare the results to a
dip-strip test. While these are not very precise, it will at least give
you a ballpark figure so you can determine approximately how many drops
the GH kit will take.