Cant seem to raise TA or PH

[PoolDoc]

The mods asked me to take a look at this. I can offer two guesses.

A. Guess #1: It is from your liner. (I don't think this one is correct, but it's simpler than #2.)

Liners vary A LOT in quality, durability, and ink stability (they are PRINTED). I've tried several times to discover a way to distinguish between liners, and haven't found one. Flexible PVC -- such as liners are made off -- is not a 'standard' material. Rather, it's a blend of hard PVC, any one of a number of 'plasticizer' compounds, plus fillers and so forth. In other words, you can think of liner material as more like "soup of the day" rather than USDA prime beef. One is somewhat standardized, the other is not.

The point of all this is that liner reactions to chemicals is unpredictable, and varies not just from one mfg to another, but from liner material lot to liner material lot (each lot is a slightly different "soup of the day".)

I realize that this is not a very satisfying response, but I'm sharing with you what I know I don't know . . . and what I know other people don't know, either.



B.Guess #2: . . . take a deep breath. This one is complicated. I will walk through it timeline wise, to keep it as simple as possible.

1. You got brown uniform stains on your white goods, from a combination of iron (doesn't take much) in your fill water and high-ish pH in your pool.

2. Your pH got low -- not "balanced" (6.8 is as low as your kit or strip goes meaning your REAL pH was 6.8 OR lower, not that it was 6.8) and (possibly) you added a HEDP based stain remover, resulting in the iron going BACK into your pool water. BUT . . .

3. You have a heater, and the low pH grabbed some copper from your heater and put IT into the pool water

OR

3. You used some copper algicide (or 'mineral' sanitizer, or some other copper based product) in your pool.


4. Meanwhile, you've been using calcium hypochlorite to sanitize (granules in a sock) raising your chlorine but ALSO your calcium and your alkalinity.

5. And, you may have been listening to pool store advice (S. O. P.) to raise your calcium to "balanced" levels.

6. All these resulted in a high calcium, high actual carbonates (can't explain this now) AND low pH, together with dissolved iron and copper in the water.

7. You started adding borax, and your pool turned milky. This happened because you had too much calcium and "carbonics" (my word -- sorta = alkalinity + dissolved CO2) present. When you raised the pH, you started precipitating calcium carbonate, iron hydroxide or iron carbonate AND copper carbonate . . . which is robin's egg blue. Ironically, something very like this process is used in water treatment and is called "Lime softening". (To soften means, in water treatment, to reduce calcium). Under certain circumstances (like using borax, instead of lime) you can lower BOTH calcium and "TA", while raising the pH.

8. The precipitated calcium carbonates adsorbed the iron (not much, fortunately) and the copper (a lot, apparently) turning the backwash blue.

So . . . the question is, have you added copper, or do you have a heater? If the answer to either is yes, odds are that my Guess #2 is right.

If so,you need to

• filter a lot,
• chlorinate with bleach,
• keep your filter backwashed,
• NOT remove the borax,
• and start adding acid AFTER your pool is clear and AFTER your filter stops removing cloudy junk. (You WANT to remove that excess copper and iron!)

Meanwhile, ignore everything except your chlorine and your pH, till you get to 7.6 or so.

Then repost test results.

There. I've told you all I don't know about this.

Ben
"PoolDoc"