Is Borax hard to find?

[waterbear]

Some history on Sodium Percarbonate and swimming pool:

Sodium Percarbonate WAS sold to the commercial pool industry by one company that I know of as a non chlorine oxidizer. It was discovered that it not only was not compatible with chlorine but it also messed up ORP readings that many commercial pool installations depend on to maintain properly sanitized water. (I was actually told this by the President of said company.) Said company had stopped selling it for pool use several years back and (after moving their manufacturing location across the country) now is selling phosphate removers!

There is still one company selling sodium percarbonate for pool use as a specialty product to clear a badly fouled pool. The company is Proteam (who brought us Supreme and did much of the initial research on Borax as an algaestat in their St. Augustine, FL test pools before they were bought out by Haviland.)
The product is called System Support and it actually does work but is expensive (both for the product itself and for the large amount of dry acid needed to maintain the pH, since sodium percarbonate, as chem geek said, is highly alkaline). Waste has called it the "Alka-Seltzer Treatment" which is an apt name.

I personally have used it on green swamps with all kinds of leaves and stuff at the bottom. It causes the stuff to float up so it can be easily skimmed off and can usually clear a mess like that in about 48 hours with one treatment. Since it is being used in a pool without any chlorine at the time and since the peroxide is expended there is no problem getting the chlorine to hold after the treatment in my experiences with it. IMHO, it is useful for a pool service that cannot be on hand to dump chlorine in every few hours to clear a pool and where expense is not an issue.

However, as Ben said, once you have a pool with chlorine in it (and not a nasty green swamp) there is NO valid reason to put it in a pool.

[PoolDoc]

Waterbear, that's really interesting.

It's been so long, I'd forgotten about it. But in the past I occasionally had nasty startups to do. At the time, I had access to 30% peroxide fairly cheaply in 15 gallon carboys. On a whim, I dumped an extra carboy in a nasty pool, just to see what it would do.

Fizz!

Basically, exactly the same thing as you describe happened, which was really nice. While chlorine will clean up swamps like that, it doesn't penetrate the goo layers well. The peroxide fluffed them all up so nicely, you could work with them.

I even have a vague memory of trying it with copper sulfate added first, which seemed to accelerate the fizzing.

But, I generally avoid such gooey cleanups, so it's not something I'd had occasion to think of for a number of years. However, at the homeowner level, you could use Baqua Shock, and probably cheaper than percarbonate.

PoolDoc

[giroup01]

I do think that Jack Magic's "O2 Safe Shock" is percarbonate as well, if I recall correctly.

[waterbear]

Paul,
I believe you are right about the O2 Safe Shock but Jacks Magic only lists proprietary in their MSDS so it can only be guessed at. Howver, there are many similarities between their MSDS and the ones for sodium percarbonate. Also, they caution about using it in chlorinated pools but recommend it for biquanide and ionizer pools and for oxidizing black coper stains to a more readily removed form. All this is in line with it being sodium percarbonate.

[PoolDoc]

Not too many people have voted, but it looks like problems with borax are isolated, rather than widespread.

That's good to know.

PoolDoc

[megd22]

I actually just posted the link to this website in another thread before reading this thread:

http://www.henkelna.com/henkel-store-locator-9949.htm

If you choose laundry care as the brand, then 20 Mule Team Borax as the item, you can search for borax within a specified mile radius of your zip code. Hope this helps!

[PoolDoc]

Very cool.

I'll repost so the link is "LIVE":

http://www.henkelna.com/henkel-store-locator-9949.htm


PoolDoc

[sturev]

The link appears to return national grocery stores chains and not other types that carry the product (local mom & pop stores, hardware, etc). I personally buy mine at my local hardware store since it's convenient (plus I'll do anything to be able to tell the wife I need to go to the hardware store ).

One cool thing on the link was I clicked around and got to the website for borax and you can download a coupon for .35 cents off per box... http://www.20muleteamlaundry.com/#