Removing copper? Weird story!

About 7 years ago, when no one else would step up for the job, I got responsibility for taking care of a small private club's pool. 80,000 gallon in ground - about 40 years old.

Anyway - we had a bad summer with tons of dust storms and summer monsoon rains, and while I was gone on vacation in July the guys helping out while I was gone lost the pool. By the time I got back this sucker was pea soup thick. Well, I don't know much but what the pool store tells me ... and they had me dumping nearly $200 worth the stuff over the course of a week and a half into the swamp. It finally clears up ... and then the motor breaks. My husband takes it apart and we bring it into the store ... the housing for the bottom of the the pump, the filter basket, and the impellor inside the pump are covered with this pretty turquoise powder ... and I can't figure out what in the world the skimmers, vaccuum or drains sucked up to cause this. We take it into the shop - the guys are stymied by the color ... till some old guy in the back of the shop looks at it and says ... "how much copper you been dumping into that pool?"

I talked to the kid who vacuums the pool and he tells me the floor of the pool was covered with turquoise something or other that morning ... but it vacuumed right up so he didn't think any more about it.

Seems like the water had so much copper in it ... it just finally got so heavy it "fell out" of the water. And the pump had a cracked impellor which we couldn't attribute to any particular thing ... just good timing, I guess.

Weird, huh?

Valerie

I'll bet the blondes (greens?:eek: ) loved that!

But that's probably because nobody was swimming in the swamp ... and my best guess is that the copper really did drop out of the water and then was vacuumed up ... I've got a couple of blonde kids and they didn't go green after this strange event.

Not recommending OD'ing the pool on copper algecides in order to get rid of it, though! ;) It was just weird!

Val