Calcium

[waterbear]

Stumbled across this discussion last nite and felt it necessary to add some
insite. I have held a public pool operators certificate for 10 years and i am appalled at the lack of understanding of the basics of pool chemistry on this site. The first thing that you missed is that lime is extremely CAUSTIC!!!, AKA alkaline! If you really want to destroy your systems this is a great first step.

What I see here is that you folks just want to back door your local pool store operator for a few bucks savings on a product that is one of the most consistent items in pool water balance.

If you cant manage an average size pool for between 7 and 10 dollars per
week working with a reputable pool store you need to get rid of the pool!

I regularly talk to several of the store owners in my area who have invested a large part of their lives to teach people to manage their pool, and are the first ones you turn to when you cant fix it by groping around here.

I wonder how some of you would feel if the customers that pay your daily wage started to figure out how not to pay you for th skill set you chose to earn a living!

First of all I probably have a better understanding than you do of the chemistry of pool water and if you care to debate me please start a thread in the 'china shop' section of the forum. The Administrator of this forum has even greater knowledge of the chemistry than I do!.
As far as the post about lime. If you read the replies it was answered! Lime is another name for calcium carbonate...also called chalk. You might know it as scale...you know, the stuff you have to scrape off with a pumice stone when you are cleaning one of the pools you service (or are you smart enough to use a mixture of pool soap and muriatic acid to do the job?) As far as being a caustic chemical....it is regularly used as a calcium additive in salt water reef aquariums. Once it is mixed with water it in a superstaturated solution it is called 'kalkwasser' (German for calcium water). If it was so caustic, as you put it, it would cetainly kill all the delicate livestock in a marine tank! I have been using it in my tanks for about 30 years now and also use calcium chloride so I know a bit about this!
As far as the neighborhood pool store I happen to work in one! There is more misinformation given to people in pool store and from product manufacturers than good advice!
As far as the topic of this thread, it concerns calcium. If you operate commercial pools I am sure that you know that calcium chloride is calcium chloride! Dow is one of the largest manufacturers of this chemical and on their website they have a section on pools and spa where they say that their DowFlake brand is what is used for pools. Dowflake is sold in large bags very cheaply to consumers as a de icer. It is exactly the same as the Dowflake that products companies buy in bulk and repackage to be sold in pool stores at inflated prices.....Ditto for Church and Dwight Co. sodium bicarbonate...It is cheaper to buy the Arm and Hammer branded baking soda then even their own Alkalinity First branded for swimming pools! Do you want to discuss sodium carbonate? How about sodium hypochlorite. Tell me what the difference is between 6% sodium hypo sold at a pool store (and yes, some of them DO sell 6%) as liquid chlorine or 6% sodium hypo sold at a grocery store as laundry bleach, other than price!

The fact that you have been a CPO for 10 years doesn't mean much. It means that you know that OTO is not allowed for testing chlorine and DPD or FAS-DPD is and you know how to fill out a fecal accident report. It means you have been given a very general overview on such topics as ORP controllers and had to do some calulations of pool volume and dosing of chems and that you learned a way to reduce carbonate hardness (you probably know it as Total Alkalinity) that does NOT work properly because it goes against known chemical principles of buffer systems. (Total alkalinity is just another name for the carbonic acid/bicarbonate/carbonate buffer system in the pool water that helps pH from drifting....Do you understand the chemisty of buffer systems?)
I suggest that you take some time and read through the forum..read through the sister website www.poolsolutions.com and learn what we are all about here before getting critical. You will find that this site teaches proper pool maintenance and that we have a lot of 'newbies' who ask questions that get addressed by more experiences users and also by industry professionals that participate on this site!

As far as your statement "I wonder how some of you would feel if the customers that pay your daily wage started to figure out how not to pay you for (sic)th skill set you chose to earn a living!"
I am in a very good position to answer that. I also have held Barber and Cosmetologist licenses for the past 30 years. Every day people are buying hair color, permenents, hair clippers, shaving cream and razors, makeup, manicuring impliments, etc. and using them at home! These definately had the potential to allow them 'not to pay me for (one of) the skill sets I chose to earn a living". My answer was to provide a level of expertise and service that they could not achieve on their own and I was very successful at that profession because of that. If more pool stores took that approach then maybe they wouldn't need to view naive customers as an unlimited money source and there would be more pools out there that did NOT have the amount of problems with water balance that seem to be far too commen amoung the average pool store customer! The answer to that is better education of pool industry personel and consumers....and that is one of the aims of this forum!

Oh, and by the way ....you misspelled 'insight'! INSITE is an acronym for Integrated Network System Interface Terminal Equipment.