Hi Steve;
I've upgraded your membership.
Regarding your pool chemical process . . . I *STRONGLY* recommend that you not change things all at once. You already -- I presume -- are operating your pools with some success. When you change methods, there tend to be hiccups, even when it's a better method!
For a homeowner, this is no big deal. Nobody will fire him, if he has an oopsy, learning to use the BBB method. But, when you are paid to care for a pool, oopsy's aren't acceptable.
We try to keep it simple, for homeowners. I've been servicing large commercial pools for 25+ years, and I've run pools successfully using gas, trichlor, dichlor, bleach, cal hypo . . . and peroxide + polyquat + UV. (I've also tried ozone and Cu + Ag.)
Here are some facts you, as a service guy, need to know:
1. Test strips aren't useless, they just aren't as accurate as the electronic readers make them appear to be. They work pretty well as a very rough and ready test, EXCEPT for CYA.
2. For fast testing, OTO is best (I think) IF you are sure there are little or no chloramine in the pool. (Non-chlorine shock will also create a false positive with OTO).
Here's what I think you should do:
1. Keep running your pools as you have been, so long as they are doing OK (looking good, passing inspection)
2. Read the Best Guess page and understand it!
3. Get a copy of your health code and find out what the acceptable levels are for Cl, pH, CYA, Alk . . . and which violations are 2 point non-criticals, and which are 4 point critical violation.
4. Get a Taylor kit (service size) and learn to use it. Order a 1 gallon jug of CYA reagent. You can pop the nozzle off the test bottles and refill them.
5. Do NOT try to get into bleach feed systems. It took me 10 years to cobble together a reliable bleach feed system, that did NOT require 2 - 3 unscheduled service calls per season per system. There are all sorts of issues with bleach degradation, oxygen off-gassing, tubing incompatibilities, and injector clogging. To the best of my knowledge, you can NOT purchase the sort of system we developed.
6. Once you've got all this done, and down, THEN start making plans to gradually improve your operation, but without taking a chance of having unexpected pool problems
Bookmarks