To Baquacil or not to Baquacil...that is the question.

Well I just discovered this site yesterday.

I'm on my 3rd year with Bac and my water is milky and smelly...yuk!

I've been running my filter 24/7 for two months, (sometimes low speed and sometimes full speed). But I can't get rid of the milkyness or the smell.

I"m using the white sand instead of the yellow sand in my filter. I even added a cartridge filter after my sand filter. My chemicals test good. Basically THERE IS NO REASON FOR MY CRAPPY WATER!

So I'm draining it....to the bottom. I have city water with good pressure so I can fill it in less than a day.

So, what do I do now? Obviously I'm going to dump my white sand and replace it with new white sand since it is three years old. But do I restart my pool with the dreaded Bac so I can finish the season and my stockpile of Bac chemicals or convert to Chlorine now?

BTW, one more very, very important note. My daughter is having her 13th birthday party this Saturday haviing the pool clean and operational is my number one priority.

Thanks everyone
Rick

If you look around the forum you will see a whole lot of happy people using chlorine and very few happy people using Baquacil. I have not used Baquacil so I can't tell you if it's good or bad but you have been using Baquacil and obviously you have not been happy. I am extremely confident that if you start up with chlorine your pool will be ready to go by Saturday and you will be a happy camper from now on.

Besides, whatever savings you might get from using up your old chemicals would be lost by the additional chlorine you would have to buy to convert later on. You could always try to sell the old chemicals on ebay.

Make sure you get a drops based test kit and if you have any problems on startup, post your test numbers and someone will help you out right away.

Good luck!

Peter

I moved into a my house a few months ago and found they had a bac pool. I decided to stay with it and haven't had any issues, other than cleaning the filter cartridges every couple of days to maintain good pressure.

I could see a bad spell costing a lot to fix as that's what usually happens with all the horror stories I've seen here.

Heres my advice....take a pencil and paper and add up all the people you can find here who switched from chlorine to Baquacil....and then add up all the people who switched from baquacil to chlorine.....and which ever list is higher thats what i would go with.:D :D

Hint....i would not think you would find ANYONE switching from chlorine to Baquacil.:eek: :eek:

My advice is to sell the Baquacil on ebay, somebody will scarf it up , and start the new water on BBB, or chlorine.

Hey Rick, i am by no means a master of Baq or chlorine. but one thing i have learned is with Baq, you should change you filter's sand every year. that even came straight from the pool store people too. i switched over to chlorine this year, and from day one haven't had any kind of problems. had all sorts of problems with the baq. and have saved a ton more money on chemicals.

I switched from Baquacil to chlorine last year and couldn't be happier. Not only am I saving a lot of $$$ but I am finally doing what the Baquacil sales pitch said I could do; spend more time enjoying my pool and less time working on it. I hate to say it, but I have only brushed my pool once this year, and did that out of guilt from not doing it. My pool is sparkling and not 1 speck of algae. If you are draining to the bottom and starting over, you should be good to go in a day or two. BTW- you didn't mention if you have a liner in your pool. If you do DON'T drain all of the water out!!! You can read how to do partial drains a couple of times and accomplish the same thing without any damage to the liner. If you don't have a liner, drain away and enjoy your easy to maintain beautiful pool! Make sure you order Ben's test kit. That, bleach, CYA, borax, baking soda, and muratic acid are about all of the chemicals you will need. Good luck!

If you have a BIG water heater, start dumping the water tonight and you might get it warm enough for the kids on the weekend. That will be the biggest issue.

Going with chlorine from the start up will be dead easy with the help you will get here. Read up on the www.poolsolutions.com site. Also run by the host of this site Ben (aka pooldoc) The navigation there is not so easy but follow the FAQs about using Bleach Borax and Baking Soda.
see http://www.poolsolutions.com/tips/10things.html and follow the little more tips at the bottom.

Hit the Walmart of similar store, get a couple of pounds of borax and baking soda, a gallon of muriatic acid and maybe 5 to 10 gallons of plain unscented bleach 5.25 or 6% and in the pool section, about 2 to 4 pounds of stabilizer ( aka CYA, cyuranic acid, conditioner etc. That's essentially all you should need to get going and keep going for nearly a month. ( Maybe a bit more if your pool is larger than normal) You will see that the $$ savings are going to start to ring in very soon.
After the water is balance most folks here use a couple of quarts of bleach a day and a couple of cups of muriatic acid ( to control PH ) a week. The CYA basically is a one shot deal to get going and adding a bit more a couple times a year to maintain it when water gets splashed out by kids or diluted by rain.

So, what to do for the weekend. Put up with what you've got or dump it and try to get it warm enough.

When you're ready to fill. Post back here with
- your pool volume
- your pool construction concrete/plaster, vinyl liner etc.
- maybe the PH, alkalinity and Calcium hardness or your fill water

Then we can give you a recipe to get started as your fill water is going in.

Good luck

PS download this small program by one of the member here MW Smith.
It will help caluclate pool volume, and how much of all the chemicals needed to
give certain results.

Ie with a 25000 gallon pool how much muricatic acid to I add to lower my PH 0.5 PPM

http://home.earthlink.net/%7Emwsmith...achCalc262.exe
Put it on the desktop of your computer. You'll use it several times in the next week or two.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by brent.roberts

If you have a BIG water heater, start dumping the water tonight and you might get it warm enough for the kids on the weekend. That will be the biggest issue.

Going with chlorine from the start up will be dead easy with the help you will get here. Read up on the www.poolsolutions.com site. Also run by the host of this site Ben (aka pooldoc) The navigation there is not so easy but follow the FAQs about using Bleach Borax and Baking Soda.
see http://www.poolsolutions.com/tips/10things.html and follow the little more tips at the bottom.

Hit the Walmart of similar store, get a couple of pounds of borax and baking soda, a gallon of muriatic acid and maybe 5 to 10 gallons of plain unscented bleach 5.25 or 6% and in the pool section, about 2 to 4 pounds of stabilizer ( aka CYA, cyuranic acid, conditioner etc. That's essentially all you should need to get going and keep going for nearly a month. ( Maybe a bit more if your pool is larger than normal) You will see that the $$ savings are going to start to ring in very soon.
After the water is balance most folks here use a couple of quarts of bleach a day and a couple of cups of muriatic acid ( to control PH ) a week. The CYA basically is a one shot deal to get going and adding a bit more a couple times a year to maintain it when water gets splashed out by kids or diluted by rain.

So, what to do for the weekend. Put up with what you've got or dump it and try to get it warm enough.

When you're ready to fill. Post back here with
- your pool volume
- your pool construction concrete/plaster, vinyl liner etc.
- maybe the PH, alkalinity and Calcium hardness or your fill water

Then we can give you a recipe to get started as your fill water is going in.

Good luck

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Thanks for responding everyone.....that was darn nice of you all.

I did a no no and drained it down to an inch. I didn't observe any wrinkles or sags. Hopefully my liner is okay and it didn't shrink and it won't tear as I fill it back up. It is a decent beaded liner and I believe it is pretty thick. It's a 24' round, 52" tall above ground pool.

As soon as I drained it I started filling it back up. Right now my 52" pool has 18" of fresh, clear sweet drinking water in it :-) It's late so I won't run the water anymore tonight. I'll start it again in the morning. With my water pressure it should take about 10 more hours to bring it up to about 50".

The filter is loaded with new white sand. I have a cartridge filter after the sand filter that will take out particles down to the several micron level. The cartridge has two weeks on it. Do you think I should replace it?

Okay, I can't decide if I should do Baq, chlorine or BBB. How much time do I have to make up my mind?

I hope I didn't screw up my liner

Thanks again,
Rick

probably too late now, but if it will take 10 hours, why not let it run over night?

I was searching for a Canadian distributor for Baq after we move into this house 3 years ago and inherited the pool.

Baq type treatements are not goverment approved up here for sanitation.
During the searching for distributors, Google offered up this site. Since then I have read case after case of people with algae blooms and after they get rid of the green they have this yukie milk that seems to be next to impossible to get rid of .

Just last week a new member here admitted spending $ 1500 in a few weeks trying to get rid of the milk. For maybe $100 for chlorine ( bleach ) and I think new sand, they got clear water.

I am so happy I could not get anyone to accept my startup order for $ 500 -700 of Baq products. There are some people out there that are happy with Baq but once it goes into tilt mode, the sound of the cash register rings frequently until the light comes on and they give up.

Too bad we had the computer crash so you could read the cases. From where I'm sitting its a no brainer.

Why on Earth would you consider doing Baquacil again??? Are you not draining it now because of Baquacil? BBB and chlorine are 1 in the same, BBB = Bleach, Baking Soda, and Borax. I highly recommend using the BBB method and running as fast as you can from Baquacil. Good luck in whatever you decide.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by VOLDADDY

Why on Earth would you consider doing Baquacil again??? Are you not draining it now because of Baquacil? BBB and chlorine are 1 in the same, BBB = Bleach, Baking Soda, and Borax. I highly recommend using the BBB method and running as fast as you can from Baquacil. Good luck in whatever you decide.

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Okay, I'm convinced that I'm not doing Baq. I don't want to drain my pool all the time anyway. If my liner doesn't stretch and rip this time I don't want to drain it again, period.

So everyone here says BBB or Chlorine. When you guys use the BBB method do you use any tablets in the skimmer at all?

Thanks,
Rick

Quote:

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When you guys use the BBB method do you use any tablets in the skimmer at all?

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Yes and No. Used judiciously, Tri-chlor (tabs) can be helpful for vacations and fine tuning some water balance details.

On start up, I would encourage you to stick with bleach. Once your up and running and your water is in good shape, the tabs can be helpful occaisionaly but they should not be used year in and year out because of the excessive CYA build up they cause.

Read through this forum and notice ALL the threads having water issues because of the extended (and extensive) use of tabs.

And just to clarify, BBB uses chlorine (from the first B - bleach) so everyone is using chlorine.

Peter

I was in the pool store yesterday to pick up some skimmer socks. They had "liquid shock" on sale in gallon jugs. It is exactly the same chemistry as the liquid chlorine they sell in bulk, that's the same as unscented bleach.

Sodium hyporchlorite is sodium hypochlorite.

Generally the cheapest place to get it is Walmart. From there all the costs go up to the absurdity I saw yesterday. 12 % sodium hypochlorite sold in a gallon jug as "liquid shock" at 4 1/2 times the price of the equivalent concentration at Walmart.

The guy in front of me in the checkout with his gallon ( and a bottle of copper based algicide ) got "poolstored".

Just last week a new member here admitted spending $ 1500 in a few weeks trying to get rid of the milk. For maybe $100 for chlorine ( bleach ) and I think new sand, they got clear water.

That new member was me. I couldn't be happier with the conversion. My pool has never sparkled like it does now. I'm so happy and so are my boys. They can now see the toys at the bottom of the deep end.

pool is full of clear water, 24ft round 4 feet deep.

but.....I put too much bleach in.... three gallons in, so my chlorine must be about 12ppm.

too strong for people right?

how long will it take to go down?

Thanks people.

P.S. anyone want to buy some baquacil products cheap? ;-)

Rick

I'm not so sure about "safe" but it might be a little rough on the eyes. Someone with more knowledge on this will need to respond here.

You should download the small program called bleachcalc that was created by MW Smith, one of our forum members.

Here is the link http://home.earthlink.net/%7Emwsmith...achCalc262.exe

It will help you calculate your pool volume, and from there, let you put in numbers for how much bleach, borax, etc to add to make a given change in your water. Note: the numbers are for the change desired, not the end result.
EG if your free chlorine is 2 and you want to raise it to 5, you enter 3 ... the desired change. Real cool little program. It will help avoid situations like this.

Leave the cover off the pool to help lower the chlorine level.

Enjoy the clear water.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by brent.roberts

I'm not so sure about "safe" but it might be a little rough on the eyes. Someone with more knowledge on this will need to respond here.

You should download the small program called bleachcalc that was created by MW Smith, one of our forum members.

Here is the link http://home.earthlink.net/%7Emwsmith...achCalc262.exe

It will help you calculate your pool volume, and from there, let you put in numbers for how much bleach, borax, etc to add to make a given change in your water. Note: the numbers are for the change desired, not the end result.
EG if your free chlorine is 2 and you want to raise it to 5, you enter 3 ... the desired change. Real cool little program. It will help avoid situations like this.

Leave the cover off the pool to help lower the chlorine level.

Enjoy the clear water.

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Thanks Brent,

You've been real helpful. I've got the program, it's really slick.

How do I know what my target values are that I am shooting for?

Thanks,
Rick

Rick,

Don't worry about the 12 PPM. I assume you haven't added any CYA to your pool so the sun will burn off a lot of your bleach until you get it stabilized. Just wear an older swimsuit for now as it might cause some fading. Look at the best guess CYA chart that is a sticky and it will tell you where to keep your chlorine at depending on the amount of CYA you have. Most people here keep it between 30-50, some higher than that. Retest your water in the morning and see what it has dropped down to. The bleach calc will tell you how much CYA to add. You want to add it slowly, as you can always increase the level a little bit at a time, but the only way to decrease it is to drain and refill. There are a ton of threads about adding CYA you can read. Good luck on your new clean pool!