Baquacil to Chlorine Conversion - Start to Finish

About a month ago (prior to site crash/rebuild) I read a TON of information on B2B (Baquacil to Bleach).

It helped me a ton (i think), and i would love to have this resource available for all the other pool owners who are tired of spending Baqua-Bucks.

I have a 22K IG Vinyl Kidney-Bean. In the north east (NY)... And i will uncover the Baqua-Beast in a few weeks.

I plan on doing the following:

-adding 7 Jugs of 3quart jugs of bleach to get levels up to 15ppm
-testing the water in the morning, and adding more to get it up to 15ppm again
-testing at night, getting it to 15ppm, and doing this every day...

once the reading STAYS at 15ppm OVERNIGHT, i will:
-assume process of B2B is complete
-resume standard Bleach Treatment



- i expect my water to turn green, and for orange crud to come out of the water.

- i will use the EXISITING sand filter media until process is complete.

- I will vac to waste the crud, and backwash the filter many many times.


Questions:
Do i CARE about PH during the process?

Who wants to buy my old used Sand that has filtererd BaquaPoo for probably 5 years at least (we just bought house in fall)


THANKS FOR YOUR HELP! I'll try to post pics of the conversion process once its starts.

Yes, mind your pH. I'd aim for 7.2. Your proceedure looks good on the conversion.

Your sand? Heh, nobody's going to buy that gooked up ball of snot! :D

Michael

Since i should be watchin the 'ol Ph, does anyone have any idea what this much bleach is going to do to the Ph?

How should i measure the Ph? - anytime? before or after i add mega bleach?

I have a copy of the bleach calculator that someone was so kind to develope and provide... will that tell me how much of what to add?

I was informed by my neighbor that the old owner was dumping *boxes* of baqua-glop in this thing on an almost daily basis. When i closed it up the baquacil levels were normal (according to the pool store - so probably high) - do these lower during the winter months?

THANKS!

Its pouring outside right now, and the pool still has this horrid cover over it. In fact, the cover just looks like a giant colapsed army tent. Its green -- just like the stupid liner. So, picutres later.

WHO CHOOSES GREEN!?

thanks!!

Yes, the bleachcalc (which i wrote :) ) will tell you how much bleach you need to add to strike a particular ppm. Just enter your bleach strength in whole numbers (i.e. 6% = 6) and your pool size. Enter 15 for ppm desired, and read off how much bleach to dump in. When you test next time, if you are at say 3 ppm and want to get back to 15, enter the difference (12) and away you go.

Michael

How do you post pictures? I remember I had to do something weird to get them imported here. I still have my conversion pictures from last year and would like to post them again. Anybody contemplating the change, DO IT! I waited until the end of summer to do it but had 1 relaxing month with no algae. I fought it all year long on Baquacil. It is very easy to do and the pitch Baquacil uses that it gives you more time to enjoy the pool is garbage. I may spend 1 hour a week TOTAL on my pool, and this includes my testing, adding bleach, and throwing the aquabot in. The water clarity is simply amazing. Even when I had no algae, there was a "foggy-cloudy" look in my deep end. Now, it is like looking in a window to the bottom of my pool. The only bad thing is I will have to figure out what to do with all the extra $$$ I will save from buying sanitizer/algistat, shock, algaecide, etc...every week. I'm sure my wife won't have any problem at all helping me out. Plus, you can play it up to your dear spouse that this is a lot of work, but you do it for her and the kids. What she doesn't know will never hurt!

Posting pix is easy, go to www.tinypic.com and upload your pic there. Post the url back to it here (or in another thread so we don't clutter up this fellow's thread).

Michael

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mwsmith2

Posting pix is easy, go to www.tinypic.com and upload your pic there. Post the url back to it here (or in another thread so we don't clutter up this fellow's thread).

Michael

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That was it. Thanks, I will post my pictures.

:D Newbie here....

Okay so this year we're switching our 24' ag from baquacil to chlorine. ( At least that's our goal )

We're in PA and although for us it's very early to have the pool open we've already taken the cover off and have been just letting the pool sit in hopes that maybe the levels will go to "0" from doing just that, sitting. (Crazy thought???) :confused:

Currently our testing strips from Baquacil read:

Sanitzer and Algistat is 15 (low)
pH is 6.8 (low)
Total Alkalinity is 80 which according to bottle is O.K.

Should we be even using these testing strips for our readings still? And/or is there another water testing kit we should be purchasing?

And of course the water temp is today 58 degrees, we've had the pool open for a little more then a week. The water is crystal clear and the pool looks absolutely gorgeous. DO YOU THINK WE COULD ACCOMPLISH THAT ALL LAST SEASON WHEN WE WANTED IT???? NOOOOOO. :mad:

Last season was our first season with the pool and furthermore we only had about a month of use at the end of the season.

The pool company we purchased from came down gave us a VERY brief 5 minute over view of do this do that, and BAM he was gone. So we're trying to figure out everything on our own pretty much.

We've hated the Baquacil from day 1.

(UNTIL NOW!!!) - the water has never been crystal clear and call me crazy I guess I just like the fact that with chlorine you smell it and it smells and feels clean.

From what I think I've read our first step to switching to chlorine is to start dumping unscented bleach in to get and keep pool at 15ppm. And I will apologize right now, right off the bat. I"M SORRY. Because I KNOW I'm going to be asking many dump questions.

15ppm of what? the sanitizer and algistat level???

What and how should we be keeping the ph level at and with?

And the alkalinity?

And my husband is flipping because he sees these ads for chlorine pumps, chlorinators, blah, blah, blah... does this mean that there's some other type of equipment we need to purchase to be doing chlorine?

Told ya I was going to be asking a lot of dump questions.

I'll stop here for right now because i know I've massively overloaded someone's brain and typing skills somewhere.

Any help and advice will be greatly appreciated. :o

Tracey

P.S. I must say just love this pool forum since I've found it! I have found a lot of great info on it.

Well, before you go ahead and do anything, you are going to need a good (drops-based) test kit. The one Ben sells here is the best i've found, it will do everything you need and do it well. If you can't wait for the kit, you'll need a Phenol red/OTO test kit.

The 15 ppm that you've heard is 15 ppm of chlorine (Cl). That's what's needed to chew up all that baqua-goop. However, high Cl levels are hard to measure with OTO, so you'll need to either:

a. dilute your sample, then multipy your results by the number of dilutions
b. buy a DPD-FAS Cl test kit, which will allow you to accurately read your Cl levels directly.

I strongly reccomend getting the DPD-FAS kit. It's considerably easier to read than the OTO test.

What i'd reccomend now is starting your own thread (instead of tagging on someone else's) that way we can keep you separate from the rest of the folks.


Michael

brungardfdc,
I'll echo what Michael said--get a good drop-based kit to start your conversion with, and please start a new thread so that you can get the most views and advice.

And no, don't worry about chorinators, generators, and the like for right now....chlorine pools can be (and are by most of the posters here) run with just plain bleach.

Janet

What Michael and Janet said:

DPD-FAS kits (different from DPD tablets) are mostly a Taylor product. Ben uses the DPD-FAS test for chlorine in his kit. So does the Taylor 2006 kit, and Leslie's sells a DPD-FAS kit under its own brand that's the Taylor kit.

DPD-FAS measures Free Chlorine (FC--the good stuff) and Combined Chloramines(CC-the used up stuff that smells like chlorine)

Total Chlorine (TC) is the sum of FC and CC.

Best is when CC=0.

The pH test from any of these, or even from the little $7 OTO/pH test kits is FINE and will do the job.

Don't rely on test strips--they are inaccurate.

Good luck!