Tabs in skimmer valid way to raise CYA?

[Mm_putnam]

I'm using bleach in pool and it's working great but I'd like to raise my CYA a bit. Was at 40 at end of May (used dichlor) and now at 35. I'm thinking of going up to 50 with it in hopes of holding a bit more FC throughout the day. I know I can buy and add stabilizer directly but I am wandering if I got a bucket of chlorine tabs and used those in skimmer to: a) have a flow of chlorine into the water as opposed to 1-2 gallons of bleach a day, and b) raise the CYA by using dichlor.

Is this idea crazy? Can I get dichlor in tabs? Am I risking raising my CYA too much as I know it takes a while to raise the CYA.

Thanks in advance.

[aylad]

You can't get dichlor in tabs, but you can get trichlor in tabs--you just have to make sure they don't contain copper. A lot of them do, but not all--just read the ingredient labels. I would not put the tabs in the skimmer, unless you have a metal problem. Instead, get a floater. That way you can adjust the flow of the chlorine, and you don't have acidic tabs sitting in your skimmer all night, ready to bathe your pump in a blast of very acidic, very high chlorine water in the morning when the pump comes on.

You need to make sure that it doesn't float over and sit right next to your liner, because that same pocket of concentrated trichlor water may be hovering right around the floater when the pump isn't on, so you might want to either keep a good eye on it or tether it from two sides of the pool to keep it in the middle. Don't let the kids play with it for the same reason.

But--it IS an efficient way to keep a steady stream of chlorine in the pool while slowly raising CYA. :)

Janet

[Mm_putnam]

Thanks for the info. I remembered as I was looking online at floaters that I have an in-line Hayward chemical feeder so I'll plan to use that for the trichlor.
One other question, how long (days) will it take the trichlor to raise the CYA? I believe I recall reading that it could take a while for the increase in CYA to show. I don't want to overshoot my target CYA level.

[Watermom]

There is no way to say how many days it will take. I can tell you this, though. Trichlor tabs add 6ppm of CYA for every 10ppm of chlorine that is added. Please make sure that your trichlor tabs do NOT have copper in them. You do NOT want copper in your pool. It is copper that stains pools and turns blonde hair green, not chlorine like most people think.

[AnnaK]

I have an inline trichlor tab feeder. I run it exclusively at the beginning of the season, i.e. with the dial set to 'full', and it takes several weeks before the CYA goes from 0 to 50. With it set this high it puts far more chlorine in the pool than necessary. My pool is ~12,500 gallons. When I set the dial do 1/4 the tabs maintain 5 ppm FC at all times, and that's with the pump running only 6 hours.

I run the feeder full blast during startup when the water is still too cold to swim. When I can measure CYA at around or near 30 ppm I add granular CYA to get to around 40 ppm and decrease the flow on the feeder to 1/8. At that point, because it's not putting enough chlorine in the water, I start adding bleach to sanitize but keep the trichlor at a very low level to maintain CYA which gets diluted from splashout and refilling.