I'm getting the impression, from various reports we get, that the Culator products 'work', but very slowly.

That actually makes sense, if you consider how little of the water actually passes through the bag and across the beads. Probably, for the Culator to be fast acting, you'd have to have a bulk amount, that you could put in an inline filter (like a 4" PVC pipe filled with the beads) that 100% of the pool water would cross. You'd have to install it downstream of the filter, to prevent the beads from being contaminated by things other than soluble metals.

Anyhow, back to the current state of things: I can't think of any reason a CuLator pack should 'die' in a month, if you can keep it clean (except for metals). So you might want to remove the Culator from the skimmer while the chlorine is high, since there's probably no *soluble* metal present, but use them during any ascorbic acid + low chlorine period.

In other words, use them to capture the iron, when you've 'dissolved' it with ascorbic acid, but otherwise store them for reuse.