CYA Remover -- is it Melamine?

[chem geek]

There have been several threads talking about various products being offered as CYA removers or reducers and has been discussed at the following links on this forum:

Cyanuric Acid Reducer/Remover (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=457)
Cyanuric Acid Remover (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=2724)
Is this possible? (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=5684)
Hardware Store selling CYA Remover (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=6181)
CYA Remover? (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=7040)

Carl and others speculated that melamine was the key ingredient in this reducing product. This patent (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4793935.PN.&OS=PN/4793935&RS=PN/4793935) from Applied Biochemists describes the use of melamine and a floc to remove Cyanuric Acid. In this post (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showpost.php?p=36871&postcount=14) I traced down the ChlorMor to allchem.com which is AllChem Industries which is an importer of chemical raw materials. They may not be related, but it was interesting to find the patent nevertheless.

One thing inconsistent in the patent is that they show reductions to < 10 ppm CYA, but presumably melamine cyanurate has a solubility of around 20 ppm and Taylor Technologies had told me that for their CYA test they ensure full precipitation by using an acidic solution since the precipitate is essentially insoluble at low pH. The results in the patent are probably because they used CYA in distilled water which would have then been acidic (since CYA is acidic) as opposed to using pool water which is buffered for pH.

Richard

[waterbear]

There have been several threads talking about various products being offered as CYA removers or reducers and has been discussed at the following links on this forum:

Cyanuric Acid Reducer/Remover (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=457)
Cyanuric Acid Remover (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=2724)
Is this possible? (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=5684)
Hardware Store selling CYA Remover (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=6181)
CYA Remover? (http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=7040)

Carl and others speculated that melamine was the key ingredient in this reducing product.


I have gotten it from 'the horses mouth' so to speak that the current CYA reducers on the market are mainly melamine with a mixture of about 6 other ingredients that perform various functions in the mix to help coagulate and suspend the melamine precipitate so it can be filtered out. (I suspect that a chitosan based clairifier plays an important part in the mixture.) I was also told by this person (who is president of a pool chemical company and was one of the people involved in the development of this product) that it really is only useful if you need to lower the CYA by about 20-30 ppm max! He told me that if you need to lower more than that to do a drain and refill. He did not really explain why.

You might find this thread (http://www.troublefreepool.com/viewtopic.php?t=1306) from www.troublefreepool.com concering this product interesting, particularly the last post that I made.