Taylor kits, decoded

This is the single most useful thing to know about the range, and it is not obvious from the K-numbers. Both kits measure free and total chlorine, bromine, pH, acid and base demand, total alkalinity, calcium hardness and cyanuric acid. The difference is reagent bottle size, not capability.

The K-1005 costs a little less and runs out sooner. Buyers rate it lower — 4.3 against 4.6 — on roughly a fifth of the review volume. If you are choosing between them, the K-2005 is the one to buy, and the saving on the K-1005 disappears the first time you replace reagents.

The genuinely different kits are at the ends: the K-1000 is an OTO kit reading total chlorine only, so it cannot show you chloramines at all, and the K-1766 reads salt and nothing else.

Not sure Taylor is the right call at all? Strips versus drops, decided in four taps.

The reason the K-numbers look arbitrary is that they are not really products — they are bundles of the same reagents in different combinations. Every kit is built from the same catalogue of numbered bottles, which is why the range appears to jump around: the K-1004 and K-2005 share most of their contents, and the K-1005 sharesall of the K-2005’s in smaller quantities.

Once you see it that way the buying decision changes. You are not choosing a capability tier, you are choosing which bottles you want to own and how much of each. It also explains the range’s real running cost: when a kit “dies”, one bottle has usually expired or run out, and buyers repeatedly report that bottle being R-0002, the DPD chlorine reagent. Replacing it costs a fraction of a new kit — several reviewers asked for exactly that without realising Taylor already sells it.

The corollary matters for anyone buying secondhand or from an unfamiliar seller: check the bottles against the instruction sheet on arrival. Kits do turn up with a bottle doubled and another missing, and because they contain chemicals they are frequently return-ineligible.

A drop kit is only as good as the person holding it, and the mistakes that produce bad readings are consistent enough to list. None of them are difficult to avoid once somebody tells you.

Rinse the comparator between tests. Residue from a previous reagent is the most common source of a reading that makes no sense. Rinse with pool water, not tap water — tap water has its own chlorine and its own pH and will quietly skew everything.

Collect the sample properly. Elbow-deep, away from the returns and away from the skimmer, with the pump running. Water taken from the surface next to a return jet is not representative of the pool, and a sample from a dead corner isn’t either.

Hold the bottle vertical and count slowly. Reagent bottles are calibrated to deliver a specific drop size when held straight down. Tilted, you get smaller drops and an artificially high count, which on a titration test translates directly into a wrong number.

Read in indirect daylight against white. Not under a kitchen bulb, not in direct sun, not against the sky. This is the single change that resolves most “the colours all look the same” complaints, and it costs nothing.

The kit itself is a plastic case and a comparator block; neither wears out. What you are actually buying over time is reagent, and reagent has a shelf life that most people shorten without realising.

Store the case indoors, cool and dark — not in the pool shed, not in the garage, and never in a car. Heat degrades the DPD reagents fastest, which is consistent with buyers reporting R-0002 as the bottle that fails first far more often than the others. A kit that lives beside the pool in August is being cooked between tests.

Cap bottles immediately and don’t swap caps between them — cross-contaminating two reagents ruins both. Write the date you opened it on the label, because the clock that matters starts at opening rather than at purchase, and a bottle that has been open two seasons should be replaced whether or not it looks fine.

When something does expire, replace that bottle. The whole point of a catalogue-numbered reagent system is that you never have to rebuy a kit, and buyers routinely do it anyway because nobody told them the individual bottles exist.

Taylor is not the only drop-kit maker worth taking seriously. LaMotte is the other name that comes up among people who test carefully, and the honest summary is that both are good and they suit different temperaments.

Taylor is the more open system: reagents are individually numbered, individually available, and widely stocked, which makes long-term running costs low and replacement easy. That openness is the main practical reason it dominates enthusiast recommendations.

LaMotte tends toward more self-contained kits and, at the higher end, digital colorimeters that remove the colour-matching judgement entirely. If reading colours is the part you find hard — and reviewers of every drop kit say some version of this — that is a real advantage rather than a gimmick.

We have not compared them side by side and we are not going to claim we have. What we can tell you is what the systems are and where the running costs sit. For genuine multi-season comparisons between the two brands’ reagents, TroubleFreePool’s forum has years of it, written by people with nothing to sell.