SO2 testing

Long time lurker, first time poster.
I've been making kit wines for about a year now and am looking into a moderately affordable so2 testing kit. Or pH and TA for that matter. Any advice? What do y'all use?

Uvas, I've tried a bunch of the test kits available, but to be honest, it was a real pain in the behind, and to be honest, I questioned the TA and SO2 kits, the PH meter will be the easiest part, you can get a real reliable PH meter for $100 or more, but if you really plan on continuing to make wine and make it the best that you can, I would look into the Vinmetrica, they offer three different units, I chose to get the SC-300, you can test PH, TA and SO2, and get solid results in n time at all.
It is a bit pricey, but if you consider how many kits you will purchase, not to mention the fact that some kits do not give reliable results for red wines, the Vinmetrica makes total sense.
A lot of people don't test their wine because simply because don't understand the process required for some kits, the Vinmetrica is fairly straight forward when testing PH, TA and SO2.

Hi Uvas,

welcome to winemakingtalk. I agree with Pumpkinman has said.

Welcome to the forum
And I also second (third) pumpkin man and Julie

How about $100 instead of $300. Its also the industry standard for free SO2 analysis. Now for the drawbacks. More to set up/cleanup. 15 min analysis time. Small learning curve but plenty of videos on how to perform the titration/analysis. Phosphoric Acid is kind of pricey to ship since it is an acid. You pay extra to ship a hazardous substance. But if you can find it locally (think pool supply store) you can save lots of $$$ on shipping. This is what I use and it works very well.

Economy Aeration Oxidation Kit

Mike, I agree on the $100 vs. $300, but my basis for recommending the Vinmetrica is that you can perform all three tests accurately and easily with one testing unit. I agree on the videos, no matter what you choose, check out YouTube, there are plenty of videos to walk you through pretty much any test kit or unit.

Where is it for sale for $300? I think I went to their site and almost coughed up a lung when I saw the price of $350 or $356 USD. I'm Cdn. It looks like a very nifty and handy gadget which I would love to get my hands on as those manual TA kits baffle me. Maybe it's because I'm just a hobbier that the price seemed so steep! Funny- I never bat an eye at spending way more than that on horse or poultry raising equipment ;-)

Thanks Team. Looks like I need to save my pennies. I suspected the Vinmetrica would be recommended option.
This looks like the kit...
http://morewinemaking.com/products/vinmetrica-sc300-so2-ph-ta-analyzer-kit.html
Thanks again!

Maybe I'm missing something, but the $100 free SO2 kit mentioned above is nothing more than a couple of beakers, bungs, tubing and an aquarium air pump ( I actually already have the model shown) save the little bit of chemical you get. I'm thinking this kit would be easy to create for the budget minded. The kit claims to only come with enough chems to do a couple of test so you would have to purchase more chems separately anyway.

Correct. Easy to9 build yourself if you wanted to. Comes with enough Phosphoric to do 10 analysis IIRC. If you have a source of Phosphoric your home free. All the rest of the chems are cheap, cheap cheap.