Couple of questions (burning eyes and Borax allergy)

[PoolDoc]

1) I am experiencing some eye irritation when I swim in my pool . My kids and wife are not really. I know that pH can cause eye irritiation. My pH is ~ 8.0. Is that eye enough to cause eye irritation? I am awaiting delivery of my Taylor test kit (eta Monday or Tuesday) to do the final balancing, but I did add a little dry acid to try to bring it back down slowly and plan to add a little each day over the weekend and test using the $8 test kit from Walmart.

With ANY of the test methods you have, and including the Taylor kits, a reading of 8.0 almost always 8 or ABOVE, not 8.0 exactly. A pH of 8.0 is not usually irritating, but your pool is not necessarily at 8.0. You can sort of tell, once you get the K2006, by doing an acid demand, to pH 7.8, and see how much acid is required.

But, I would NOT recommend waiting. Go ahead and buy a gallon of muriatic acid, and begin lowering the pool's pH. Read our muriatic acid handling guide, before you use it.

2) My son seems to have an allergy to Borax. My wife has tried to use it on his laundry a couple of times, and he broke out into a rash. . . . . My question is this....is 30 - 50 ppm of borates anywhere near the concentration that you might find in a washing machine?

As Kelemvor pointed out, borax levels in your pool WILL approach washing machine borax levels. BUT . . . your son was not in your washing machine (at least, I hope not!)

I cannot find ANY credible reports of allergic reactions to borax. If they were common, they'd be in the MSDS sheet, but you can read the US Borax version here, and see that that is not the case. I'm not sure how much you have dealt with allergies; hopefully not as much as I have. My older son nearly died when he was 3, due to an acute attack of allergic asthma, and we've dealt with severe true allergies ever since -- I personally gave him allergy (antigen) shots for 5 years. Here are a couple of things that people often forget about finding allergies and particularly, chemical allergies:
1. It takes VERY careful exclusion of OTHER allergens to determine that an individual is allergic to what they think they are allergic to.
2. Irritation and allergies are different. For example, chlorine bleach is an irritant, but not an allergen.
3. People are often not careful to identify the actual chemicals involved. For example, both borax (sodium tetraborate) and perborates (like sodium perborate) are used in laundry. Borax is not much of an irritant, and is apparently not a reported allergen, but sodium perborate is very much an irritant, and may well be an allergen. I found this:

Fisher's Contact Dermatitis
By Robert L. Rietschel, Joseph F. Fowler, Alexander A. Fisher
http://goo.gl/6iA5w

I couldn't find (at least not quickly) any genuine medical discussion of perborate allergies, but I did find that the CDC reports a medical code for "perborate allergy", which suggests that some doctors at least think there is such a thing: http://goo.gl/yaUMt

So . . . my guess is that your son is NOT allergic to borax. The simplest case is that your wife used a perborate based "oxygen bleach" that mentioned something like "derived from all natural borax", rather than plain 20 Mule Team brand borax. If she did use borax, then it gets more complicated. There should NOT be any borax remaining, if she used it on the wash cycle, and did a proper rinse. But, you'd have to test, by running a load with ONLY plain-as-possible no-allergy bleach (plain Tide?) plus borax, plus NOTHING else -- no softener in the rinse, no stain spray, no softener towels in the dryer . . . and then see if the rash occurs.

Bottom line: I really, really doubt that your son is allergic to sodium tetraborate decahydrate . . . which is 20 Mule Team borax. He might be allergic to sodium perborate "Oxygen bleach" and some of the OTHER per-something bleaches are even worse. But if these are being used in the wash cycle, they STILL should be a problem UNLESS they are able to combine with something that carries them through the rinse.

Once you've solved the wash issue, you can move on to actual testing with borax. I'd just buy a box of borax, put a tablespoon in a cup of warm water, mix it, and then take a Q-tip and dip it. Touch the wet Q-tip to the inside of your son's arm, making a small wet dot . . . and wait. If he doesn't react, you should be good to go. But, you can go a step further, and add a cup of borax to a bath tub, and let him have a bubble bath (dunno his age -- maybe he's beyond that!) in it. If you get no reaction there, use it in your pool!

You should have liquid Benadryl on hand anyhow (basic first aid for allergic responses), but if you don't, to be safe get some. I can't imagine that a systemic reaction is possible, and not present on the MSDS sheets, but again, I'll simply warn that if there's ANY evidence of a systemic response and ESPECIALLY if there is any difficulty in breathing, take him IMMEDIATELY to an emergency room. (In general, for ANY allergic response that involves breathing difficulty, you are facing a true emergency -- people die from allergy shots in 15 minutes! We keep injectable epinephrine around at all times, and I take it with my Scouts on hiking trips, because I've got a couple of guys that have bee sting allergies. If you EVER encounter such a situation, getting the victim to E-room as quickly as possible is critical -- this is one situation where driving fast is warranted. Check with your doctor, but the best info I have suggests that you give the best form of benadryl available (injectable, liquid, tablets -- in that order of preference) AND if you have injectable epinephrine (Epi-Pen) use that - which gives you about 15 minutes. I've been told that liquid benadryl may reach the system that fast -- but I carry TWO pens or ampules.)

Once you've ruled out borax, you may want to go back and see what your son IS reacting to, and also try to determine if the reaction is irritation or allergic response. The difference can literally be life and death, since allergic sensitization can continue to the point of triggering anaphylactic reactions like I mentioned above; where as irritant reactions do NOT escalate in that fashion. You should ask your doctor about the rash, to try to determine whether it was irritation or hives (allergic rash). He'll probably want to know whether the rash lined up with the 'contaminated' clothing (irritation more likely) or covered your son's body in areas NOT in contact with the clothing (allergic reaction).

My readings are very tough to be certain of, to be honest. I am not color blind, but both of the strips I started out with use shades of colors that my strips do not seem to really match. . . . . I got good readings on pH (and verified them by using tap water and by adding very small amounts of dry acid to the tap water to force the pH lower.

(Get the K-2006!) I think we mention that frequently. The drops based pH readings are probably trustworthy. The high OTO reading in tap water is not necessarily wrong: call your water company (or look online) and see if they are doing monochloramination. If they are, OR if you live VERY close to the treatment plant, chlorine levels greater than 3 ppm are very possible. However, with chloramination, your FREE chlorine levels (DPD) may be zero, while your OTO (yellow) drops may show 5 ppm of TOTAL chlorine.

However, I have been using a solar cover to supplement my heater, and it has a little bit of a chlorine smell when I pull it off. . . . Would the chlorine be working on that stuff at night and the CC not be able to escape until I remove the cover? Would that explain the light chlorine smell on the cover but that there is none later when we are ready to swim?

Yes.