aciam - Nightmare conversion from baquacil to chlorine

[chem geek]

Yes, I think it's OK for you to hit with more sodium percarbonate to see if that lowers the CC further. At least going from 20 to 8 was a good positive step and you did the right thing not to add the bleach yet since you were still measuring CC. Your situation may be more extreme than Reesie's. Keep us posted.

[waterbear]

Like I said before, it may take two or three "treatments" with percarbonate before you oxidize all the 'goo' in the water.

[aciam]

Hi guys - so my news is disappointing this morning. My test on the bucket water was FC=0 CC=35 but I have to tell you the titrating is really weird so I'm not sure how accurate the cc is - like I said yesterday the water turns a very light pink upon adding the CC reagent (0003 I think) - ( usually on my pool water it turns very dark pink because the CC is so high) but when I add the titrating reagent the light pink is totally resistant to turning clear. This morning it took 70 drops to get it clear - and once it sat for a minute, turned pink again, and continued to turn darker.

I have no idea what is going on. I decided to test my pool water this morning too - just to make sure I wasn't screwing up the procedure of testing and I got good numbers; FC = 3.5 ( last test was 4 2 days ago with no new bleach) and CC down to 4.5 ( last test was 20 2 days ago)
The water responded appropriately to the titrating agent.

I don't know what to do now. Add more percarbonate to the bucket? Add more bleach to my pool? Start draining???????? aciam

[chem geek]

Mmmm... that's interesting. Maybe the very light pink that persists is some other interference either from some strange CC or from the hydrogen peroxide. Tell you what...why don't you add chlorine to the bucket until you measure a consistent FC level and then we'll see if the CC still has this weirdness. I don't think the CC is actually very high at all -- it's just got some strange test interference.

By the way, at least the CC seems to be dropping in the pool itself. That is consistent with another report where it took about 2 months for the CC to go away. So with the percarbonate approach we're really looking at seeing if it can accelerate the process. Let us know what happens in the bucket after you add the chlorine to it.

[aciam]

Thank you chem geek - I knew it seemed weird. Well, my husband and I decided to drain the pool since it is almost july and we will be lucky to have 8 more weeks of swimming here in massachusetts. we are draining as we speak and have water being delivered tomorrow. I just don't want to wait another month to swim and essentially miss out on the summer. but if I have time, I will add bleach to my bucket just for kicks to see what might happen and report the results to you. I have 6 pounds of the percarbonate that I will have to find some other use for! Maybe I should send it to reesie! Hope she had a good day with her pool!

i will need instruction as to how to start up the new water with chlorine. Can someone give me the cliff note version? or is there a page on the forum that will guide me?

Thanks to all for the help. aciam

[Watermom]

Posters:

Aciam has started a new thread asking for helping getting her new water balanced. So, please do not add it here in this thread. Thanks.

[chem geek]

aciam,

Sorry we couldn't help you out faster, but I understand you're wanting to just drain/refill and enjoy the summer swimming. At least we're getting info to hopefully help the next people who might have a similar problem and hopefully have a better solution for them. If you do finish off the bucket test, just post here with the results as that will be helpful.

Ricahrd