Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Water chemistry water alkalinity for beginners

Can someone review this basic explanation of water alkalinity vs hardness and tell me if this is correctly applied to our pond management?

I found it interesting to try to understand how hardness and alkalinity measure different things, and importantly how hardness doesn't tell you which element is actually making up your hardness. Acid/base balance comes in to the equation as well.

Some of the tips (like testing your soil as well as your water) is new to me.

is the advice/rule of thumb to add 5lb of ag gypsum per acre foot to bring the hardness up 1 unit (ppm) still a good rule of thumb?

I'm researching if crayfish, scuds, and shrimp (crusty critters) would do better if I raised the calcium content (hardness) of my pond and then how that relates to alkalinity. I need to figure out an easy to use test kit for water quality tests.

I just fertilized my lawn on Saturday with a zero phosphorous, slow release nitrogen, and low percent potash fertilizer. It comes preformulated with biosolids taken from reprocessed chicken manure to help with the 'micro-nutrients'. But we had a much needed but rather heavy rain today that sent a deluge of street and lawn run off into the pond. I now have a very turbid pond and assume had more than usual nitrogen load run into the pond. I expect a massive bloom and want to stay ahead of water quality if I can. I already have more than normal floating FA mats covering about 10% of the pond ready to be raked out.

Here is the link to the short article that I found even me the novice could read.

Alkalinity and Hardness in Production Ponds

The article is good. See these 2.

https://srac.tamu.edu/fact-sheets/serve/262

https://srac.tamu.edu/fact-sheets/serve/112

Most times it is not good to add N (other than in small amount after testing) to ponds.

Thanks for those articles!
Is there a test kit (maybe on Amazon) that will better spell out the alkalinity and hardness than a standard pool test kit?

CC, look at the LaMotte test kits, as they have lots of very accurate options. I'm slowly replacing all my existing water testing stuff with LaMotte products.