Back story: We just bought this house in Oct. When we moved in, we replaced the water softener with a combo softener/carbon filter (wanted to remove chlorine and other contaminates from the water). Unfortunately, ALL of the plumbing in the house including the ouside spigots are softened/filtered. Since softened water is bad for plants (and we have to pay for water), we are going to be adding a rain barrel to our house soon.
One more pertinent piece of info... The alkilinity of our city water is at least 320ppm. The potentially low ph of rainwater would help the process of lowering the alkilinity of the pool. And not only would the rainwater keep from raising the alkilinit every time I add water, but it would actually dilute the alkilinity further (and it's free). So, my questions are:
1) what are the risks or downsides to using rainwater for refilling our pool?
2) what are the "best practices" for doing so (pre-treating the water, filtering it somehow, adding it through the skimmer, something else I'm not thinking of right now)?