Mixed Chemicals = Cloudy Swim Spa / Pool

[PoolDoc]

I'm sure he believes it's true that you should. It's been a 'truism' in the pool/spa business for year, although without much foundation, that chlorine was for pools and bromine was for spas. It's one of those things I wrote about years ago, things that 'everyone' in the pool biz knows to be true, but aren't.

*If* you actually use only bromine . . . which means using sodium bromide and bleach, there might be some benefits. But there's quite a bit of data from Canadian and British studies that hydantoin from bromine tabs builds up and causes real problems.

By the way, I don't think Chem_Geek noticed that you were using Chlor-Brite, which I assume is the Leslie's dichlor, so instead of not having enough stabilizer, you probably had too much.

[milhouse19]

Sounds like Chlorine is the way to go.

So how does adding bleach before I drain the pool help? Wouldn't it just add more Chlorine to the overly-chlorinated pool?

In any event, I am going to drain and refill tomorrow. As a general rule, how much Chlorine would I need to add initially and add each week? Or should I just try to use household bleach?

My wife is probably going to be pregnant soon but needs the pool for therapy, so anyway to lower the amount of chemicals would be welcome. I am not someone who freaks out of things like this, but I also think its always better to minimize chemicals if I can.

Thanks for all your help.

[chem geek]

Ben is correct that I missed the posts about the Chlor-Brite. I now see the subsequent posts where you say you used Chlor-Brite. That is Dichlor where for every 10 ppm Free Chlorine (FC) it also increases Cyanuric Acid (CYA) by 9 ppm. So even with a low 0.5 ppm FC per day chlorine addition (and yours might be higher at 1 ppm), this is over 13 ppm CYA increase PER MONTH. So your CYA level may be very high and that makes the chlorine much less effective. I suspect you may have high Combined Chlorine (CC) as a result and that can be very irritating. After you get your Taylor K-2006 kit, you'll have proper readings for FC, CC, pH, TA, CH and CYA. We can then figure where to go from here, though I strongly suspect you'll need to replace more water to lower the CYA level.