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Hoping to get some advice on using bleach and borax for the first time this year. I have a 24x48 above ground pool w/ a 100 lb. sand filter. Getting ready to open pool, and not sure how much of these products to use for start-up, and then for maintaining. Tired of spending so much on pool chemicals at the store! Thank you for any help!!
Hi and welcome to the Pool Forum. Your pool's volume would be around 12,000 gallons. Each quart of 6% bleach would add approximately 1.2ppm of chlorine to the pool. But, without knowing what your current water testing results are (taken with a drops-based kit -- no "guess strips"), we cannot advise you what chlorine levels you need to run.
If you don't have a good kit, you should get one. The one we recommend is the Taylor K-2006 or 2006C which you can get through the testkit link in my signature.
In the meantime, you should pick up a cheap OTO/Phenol Red kit (red and yellow drops) at Walmart or someplace. If they have the HTH 6-Way kit, that is also a good starting kit to have before you get your good one.
In addition to chlorine and pH readings, the CYA reading is also important to know since your needed chlorine levels are based on the CYA. (See the Best Guess Chlorine Chart in my signature.)
Repost with some numbers and also tell us what size pump you have and if you have a kit of some sort. What condition is the water in?
We'll help you get going with this once we have more info. Hope this helps.
By the way, do a lot of reading here on the forum (especially the stickies at the top of each forum.) Also read on our sister website www.poolsolutions.com.
Thank you Watermom! I do have an oto kit, and my pump is 3/4 horse. Don't have any numbers yet since haven't opened my pool. Will be doing so in a few days, and can tell you some numbers then. I will appreciate all your help!
Hello, I just wanted to say that I have successfully had beautiful, sparkling clean water since opening our pool this year using borax, soda and bleach. However, I would encourage you to purchase stabilizer since there is not a substitute. And, the pool seems to need more bleach all the time, whereas, once acceptable pH and alkalinity levels were reached, it has been weeks since more of these have been needed.
One thing that I didn't realize was that even if the pool has not had lots of swimmers in it, the Hayward sand filter still has to be backwashed. That is the only time the water had any kind of slight cloudiness.
The usual rule is that you backwash a sand filter whenever the pressure rises 8-10 psi over clean filter pressure. (Hi, Jan, and welcome you also to the Pool Forum!)
Hi Jan, glad to hear your having good luck with bbb. Just opened my pool today, so I'll see how it goes :)
Ok, got pool opened today. Looked like a pond, lol. Chlorine was 0, and ph 6.8......so i put in 3 gallons bleach, and 1/3 box borax, plus 2 3inch chlorine pucks left-over from last year. After running pump for 3 hours i tested, and chlorine was at 1, and ph at 7.2. Very happy with those results already, coz last year it took me 6 bags of shock and 2-3 pucks o even start to get a reading on chlorine. Hopefully i can get it aall clear in a day or 2 and lots of backwashing!
Just remember that your pool didn't get in that shape overnight, so don't be surprised if it takes longer than overnight to fix it--one of the most critical ingredients when cleaning up a mess is POPP ( pool owner patience and persistence!! :cool: ) Glad you're making progress though--stay with it and it'll be clear before you know it! :)
Janet
Oh how i know that Janet....been doing this for many years now :) And a question about comments on here: How do i find out if someone commented without having to hunt my original post?
thank you for the warm welcoming words, PF friends.
True confessions...I am using the test strips, but water is beautiful and clear for 2 months. So, we are good to go. What is the significance of the other more complicated kits?
You can go to 'settings' in the upper right hand corner and then 'general settings.' On that page there is a place to subscribe to a particular thread and you can set it to send you an email when a new post is made in the thread.Quote:
Originally Posted by klyeany
With test strips you cannot get an accurate reading for most values. On chlorine, they can tell you if you do have chlorine or don't but not really what the level is. On CYA, they can't give you anywhere near the accurate reading and if you don't know your CYA, then you may not be chlorinating at the right level and you risk an algae bloom. If you have high CYA and need to run higher than usual chlorine readings, (see the Best Guess Chlorine Chart in my signature below), you can't test the chlorine with test strips because first of all they can't test that high and secondly they will bleach out. With the Taylor FAS-DPD test, you can test chlorine levels up to about 50. Test strips cannot test for CC which is an important thing to know when you are trying to determine what is going on in a pool that is having water issues of some sort.Quote:
Originally Posted by JanMiddleton
Where do you suggest buying CYA, i have been using the BBB approach but I think my CYA is probably Zero, because I add Chlorine all the time.
@ nottapooltech: The easiest way to add stabilizer is often to use dichlor for awhile:24 lbs PoolBrand bagged shock @ Sams ClubOn your pool, you'll after 12 bags (or pounds) of dichlor, you'll have 50 - 60 ppm of stabilizer. You can also add stabilizer directly, but it dissolves VERY slowly, so you have to either put it on the filter or put it in a sock in the skimmer. We had been telling people that they could get it anywhere, but this year, some of the chemical companies have begun blending IT with goop too (they've been doing so with dichlor trichlor and cal hypo for the last few years), so until you are an expert label inspector, it may be better to use this link:
Kem-Tek Dichlor 22 lbs @ Amazon
Kem-Tek Stabilizer 4lbs @ Amazon
ohhh okay light bulb just came on i think, i can get stabilizer in my pool by adding shock (sams club stuff) which has chlorine in it, or by just adding stabilizer directly to it, which is the kem-tek stabilizer you speak of.
You got it!
nottapooltech,
You could temporarily use Trichlor pucks as your chlorine source. Trichlor also contains cyanuric acid (CYA) so this is an easy way to add CYA to your water. Be careful with the Trichlor because it also is acidic and will lower your pH. You willl need to regularly test your pH and adjust with Borax as necessary. Also, you'll need to test your CYA levels after maybe a week of use to see how much CYA has been added. Remember too much CYA (I keep mine around 50-70ppm) means you need to maintain higher chlorine levels. At CYA around 50ppm, you would need to maintain FC at 3-6ppm at all times. If you should have too much CYA, the way to lower it is to remove some of the water and add fresh water to dilute.
As others mentioned in the posts above, you could also just add CYA granules; however, for me the granules took a while to disolve and some even came out the returns. I found that temporarily using Trichlor to raise my CYA was easier as long as you test regularly and switch to an unstabilized form of chlorine (i.e. bleach) once you reach your desired CYA level.