Counterpoint on home kit substitute, offered without confidence: the same observation is consistent with a much duller explanation, and nobody has ruled the dull one out.
I changed my mind about home kit substitute after someone here asked me for the source and I could not produce one. That is worth saying out loud because it is the ordinary way it happens.
Post #29 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.
Precision of home tests: most consumer-accessible devices are not precise to the level people want ("is this 99% pure or 97% pure"). They give a yes/no or a rough category, not a quantitative number.
Post #42 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.
I read the earlier replies on home kit substitute twice before writing this, because I had assumed the opposite and wanted to be sure I was disagreeing with what was said rather than what I expected.
Adding the measurement that post #99 says would settle it.
On home kit substitute I would separate what is worth knowing from what is worth acting on. The first list is long and the second is short, and conflating them is how threads get heated.
Reagent shelf life is a real constraint on kits and is frequently ignored. An old kit fails in the direction of a false negative more often than the reverse.
Anyone with a larger sample, please post it.
Where home testing is genuinely valuable is as a screen before spending on independent analysis, not as a substitute for it.
One of those cases where knowing the mechanism does not help the decision.
Read the full topic (132 posts)
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