Chlorine %?

[Watermom]

I use only the generic WalMart bleach in my pool.

Me, too!

[stlbill]

Hi gang:

6% generic bleach is $0.016/ounch at Wal-Mart here in St. Louis. I was doubling the price for 6% because I always seem to need double the amount talked about on these forums compared to 12.5% from the pool store.

So, in every gallon of 6% bleach there is 120 ounces of water. What do you guys think the quality of that water is? What do you think the total disolved solids and calcium hardness is like?

The reason I ask about the water in bleach is to promote bleach use for people trying to lower the parameters you can only lower by adding good water such as CH (excluding rare high pH method), CYA and TDS.

I'll leave you with one more thought...

Shouldn't we be able to calculate define units of hydrochloric acid required to offset a given amount of bleach? Not talking about other things that would make your pH change - just the bleach - you should be able to say for every gallon of bleach add 4 ounches of acid, right? If you add two gallons of bleach then 8 ounces of acid. Make sense?

Thanks in advance!

-Bill
St. Louis, Missouri

[PoolDoc]

So, in every gallon of 6% bleach there is 120 ounces of water. What do you guys think the quality of that water is? What do you think the total disolved solids and calcium hardness is like?

Actually, there are more like 128 fluid ounces -- the sodium hypochlorite is dissolved in them. As for the water quality . . . it's pretty close to distilled. It messes up the manufacturing process when it's not.

[chem geek]

You can read how Odyssey Manufacturing goes to great pains to remove even trace metals from the water because it can cause the chlorine to degrade too quickly and to produce too much oxygen. For every 10 ppm Free Chlorine (FC) from sodium hypochlorite (or lithium hypochlorite), it results in 17 ppm sodium chloride salt. Half of this is from the salt in the initial product and the other half is from the chlorine when it gets used/consumed as it becomes chloride. ANY chlorine product will produce 8 ppm salt from 10 ppm FC. However, Trichlor and Dichlor will also add 6 ppm and 9 ppm Cyanuric Acid (CYA), respectively, while Cal-Hypo will add at least 7 ppm Calcium Hardness (CH) in addition to salt from the usage/consumption of chlorine.

[chem geek]

While Clorox Regular bleach (in the U.S.) is 6%, most off-brand regular bleaches are 3% or less, but the off-brand Ultra bleaches are 6%. As for what is in bleach, if 6% sodium hypochorite, then it also has 4.7% sodium chloride (salt) with the rest, 88.7%, water. There is a very small amount of excess lye, the amount varying by brand, but in Clorox Regular it's around 0.06%.