Hardware Store selling CYA Remover

[elsie]

I was rather rushed the other day but happened by an isle of CYA Remover. It came in a large bottle. The label said it would remove "50 ppm of CYA in a 10,000 gal. pool" WITHOUT draining and refilling.

I can't tell you how amazed I was. Has anyone else heard of this? I admit I haven't been religiously following the forum as of late, my pool having been to bed until May, but it was a first for me!

[chem geek]

There are several threads talking about CYA Remover including this one. Since the ingredients are not listed on the product we can only speculate what it is, but strongly suspect that it is just melamine. Melamine is the same chemical you add in the CYA test that makes the water cloudy when CYA is present. Technically, it precipitates CYA and though your filter will hopefully filter out much of the CYA, your pool will likely be very cloudy for quite some time using this product. At least that's our best guess at this point in time. You're welcome to try it and let us know if it's a disaster -- just kidding.

Richard

[elsie]

It's sinful that the ingredients are listed. In fact, it should be illegal. How could poison control help a child or animal that's ingested it?

Fortunately, I have no CYA issues because I exclusively use the bleach method! I'll check out that thread.

[chem geek]

It's sinful that the ingredients are listed. In fact, it should be illegal. How could poison control help a child or animal that's ingested it?

I don't have a bottle so cannot tell you for certain, but the bottle may very well have warnings such as "POISION" and "Do not ingest" and "If ingested, do (or do not) induce vomiting", etc. One normally doesn't find ingredients listed on proprietary formulations unless it's something we are supposed to ingest (i.e. food, drink, pills). The fact that we do find it listed on many household and pool products is fortunate. Sometimes one can find out more information from a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS), but I couldn't find one for this product, and even then one sometimes sees "proprietary formulation" instead of specific ingredients.

Richard

[matt4x4]

Elsie - you comment of "fortunately, I have no CYA" strikes me as odd, you do the BBB method - great, but you should still have a CYA level just so you can retain your Chlorine so it can fight algae for you. Without CYA in your pool, the Chlorine would leave very quick and you would have a very inefficient chlorine amount to algae kill ratio.

May I suggest you add some CYA this coming spring, maybe get it up to 20-30ppm, it will keep your Bleach consumption down a lot.