advice needed about my water readings

Thanks for the explination it at last makes more sense my usual ph readings are 7.6 with high ph of 7.4 think the last readings were high because i'd done a water change about 3 hours before, which i'm thinking means the actual ph is around 7.5! please correct me if i'm wrong, i've only used the test strips before and decided i needed to get a proper test kit as its a much bigger tank than my old one, which i have started to cycle so i can move some of the gouramis in there, i'm not sure which ones to move,although i was thinking of leaving the pearls as they are and move all the dwarf gouramis which would be 1 male and 3 females do you think this would work better? also what would be the maximum stocking level for a 30g (125 litre) tank as i've read a lot of different things on how to work out the stocking level which don't seem to be very accurate, as i don't want to over stock my tanks in the future.
many thanks for the advice
 
I forgot to say i've retested my ammonia levels today and they've stayed down at 0.0 now for the last few days!!
 
glad to hear it... whats goin on with the gouramis?
 
I get exactly the same readings from my high and low PH tests. They disagree by a couple of points. I just split the difference and call it 7.5.
 
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