I was able to locate another dealer that offered me a better price (almost as good as online) but without the proration - you do what ya gotta do. I still had to pay the tax though.
However, it's obvious to me that I am going to have to rebalance my pool. My pool is an inground with a Premix Marbletite Marquis finish and comes in at about 11000 to 12000 gals is my buest guess but a calculator says around 15K gal. Its an odd shaped pool. It is uncaged, and gets sun from 8:00 am to 7:00 pm right now. My current pool stats according to the pool store:
Salt 4200
CYA 120
FC 1
pH 7.8
TA 105
Calcium Hardness 260
TDS 5001
You need to subtract your salt reading of 4200 from this to get the remaining TDS, which is really not a very useful test. Your TDS is about 800 according to the store's tests, which I find suspect! TDS stands for Total Dissolved Solids which will be the salt, calcium, CYA, magnesium. potassium, bicarbonates, sulfates, etc that are in your water.
The pool store recommended that I put in two cups of acid to bring down the pH and 1 gal of liquid chlorine to up the FC level.
I would ignore the store's tests and recommendations! Trust your own testing, assuming your reagents are fresh. If not I would order new FAS titrant, possibly new DPD powder, possibly pH reagent (it does go bad!) and, if you want to test salt chemically a Taylor K-1766 from Taylor Technologies, it has fewer problems than the salt test included in the PS234 even though they are basically the same. The difference is the concentration of the titrant for chloride.The test is tricky at best and because of static and non uniform drop size because of some static issues in the PS234 droppers it can often give a reading that is a bit higher than it is. As an alternative AquaChek salt test strips are a useful tool as long as they are fresh and have not been exposed to humidity. With any chemical test for chloride ions, reagent or strip, the results will not be the same as the conductivity reading from the cell but if they are within about 800 ppm you are certainly in the ballpark.
My handy dandy PS234 #6477 test kit gives me the following readings:
FC 1.5
Too low, keept it around 4-5 ppm at all times
pH 7.5
Fine for now but you don't want it to go any higher than 7.8. When it does drop it to 7.5 and not lower because the lower you put the pH the faster it rises.
Alk 80
OK but would be better at 70 ppm.
Cal 300
Should be just a bit higher to keep the water balanced for your plaster finish. I would bump it up to around 350 to 400 ppm given a TA of 70-80 ppm.
Cya 70
OK for now but if it drops any lower bump it back up to 80 ppm.
Salt 3800 ~ 4000
Meanwhile, my new and improved (working) cell allows me to get the following readings from the Aqua Rite control box:
Salt 3200
You want to go by instantaneous salt and not average salt readings so ignore this.
Temp 92 deg
Volts 24.3
Amps 7.70
40% chlorine generation
~3800 (Instatenous salt test)
This is your salt reading, It is also in line with the titration test you did. It is a bit high but livable. As we are going into rainy season here in Florida I would not lose any sleep over it!
AL 0
r 1.40
What is the next recommended step to do. Should I drain and refill to lower the salt level or should I leave it as it is because within one week, the overflow from all the rain will do the job of lowering the salt level for me?
What is this borates thing? If you haven't guessed, I do not have much of a clue about this stuff....
Thanks for your help.
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