Foamy chemical floating on surface...

Hi..

Yesterday, we tried adding Leslie's sand filter revitalizer - http://www.lesliespool.com/Home/Filt...ies/14400.html - through our skimmer to clean out our filter.

I guess we poured it in too fast, and some of it wasn't backwashed - it came back out through the circulation system.

This morning, the whole pool is covered with a foamy, oily sheen. The bottle says to wash skin for 15 minutes if it comes into contact with it, so I guess no swimming for awhile.

Does anyone have any ideas how to remove something like this that's just floating on the surface and doesn't get filtered out by the pump?

Thanks...

Membership upgraded.

It's been a few days; hopefully it's gone now. Solar UV + chlorine will clean up a bunch of things.

If it's NOT gone, I'd call Leslie's. I did find the MSDS . . . and the ingredients are NOT something I'd want in the pool:

Citric Acid - 77-92-9
Etidronic acid - 2809-21-4
Butoxyethanol - 111-76-2
Poly(Oxy-1,2-ethanediyl),.alpa.-(nonphenyl) - 9016-45-9

+ Citric acid reacts badly with chlorine and is a problem on indoor pools. It should be OK on an outdoor pool after a few days.
+ Etidronic acid is just HEDP, a metal sequestrant. It's not a problem.
+ Butoxyethanol is a apparently an unregulated carcinogen (Wikipedia). If the Wiki article is accurate, you do NOT want to swim in that stuff.
+ Poly, etc is a apparently an "ethoxylate" that's not too bad for people, but is not so good for fish. Makes me wonder about them putting in a filter cleaner that's going to be backwashed into ditches, etc. Maybe that particular product is not so toxic to aquatic life. Or, maybe there's very little present -- the MSDS didn't have percentage values.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethoxylation
http://hazmap.nlm.nih.gov/category-d...=copytblagents
http://toxipedia.org/pages/viewpage....pageId=6017181

Sorry it took so long to respond; good luck!

MSDS & Wiki article in thread archive @ 21298