Re: Home and garden projects
 

troublefreepool is an amazing resource. Chemgeek is exactly as his pseudo suggests and has added his expertise.

chawkins? my cya went to about 160 ppm. oh dear god. nightmare. these guys walked me through it all and now I have zero problems with the water. The odd thing on the pump /filtration system but then someone there knows the answer. Saved me $100 the other week by letting me know I could replace just a small part on the pool cleaner instead of replacing the whole thing which is what the pool store said I had to do....

Re: Home and garden projects
 

Yes. And several others. The previous owner of my house used a mineral system and chlorine tablets. He admitted to me before we bought that he was constantly fighting algae outbreaks. He had replaced the liner the previous year but it already had metal stains on it.

The first thing I did was throw out the mineral system and install a SWG. It uses salt to provide a constant stream of chlorine (and nothing else). The metal stains cleared up within a few weeks.

The pool has been crystal clear for 2 years. All I do is check the FC, PH & CYA periodically and adjust the SWG to keep my FC around 4-5ppm.

I have to add salt & CYA occasionally due to the rain dilution. Once or twice a year, I add acid to adjust PH. This is rare as my PH is very stable now.

Your chlorine tablets and shock will be adding CYA which builds up, fighting the chlorine. Over time, CYA will get to the point that no amount of chlorine will protect the water and you will need to drain and refill.

Really, don't take my word for it. Head over to TroubleFreePool and do some reading. They get posts almost daily of people 'pool-stored' into spending hundreds of dollars on chemicals only to end up with a swamp when it gets out of hand.

Here is just one recent example.


You already said you had an algae outbreak and the solution was to throw in a $10 bag of chemicals (shock) from the pool store.

Re: Home and garden projects
 

:goodpost:

Re: Home and garden projects
 

Guys, I frequent that website quite often. You don't have to convert me, lol.

As soon as I deplete the stocks I have I'll be switching to the bleach method!

As for minerals, my nature2 is working well. I have a cartridge to last this season and I'll re-evaluate at the end.

I understand the cya issues. Right now the water has about 40.

The algae was my fault for forgetting to chlorinate. Sure a salt water system would have done that for me automatically.

Re: Home and garden projects
 

I hear you. I had a bucket of tablets left over by the PO. I used them for adding CYA until they were gone.

But 0.5ppm chlorine is not enough to properly sanitize your water. It may look clean but it really isn't and you're treading a fine line between clean water and algae (as you have already discovered). At 40CYA you need to be targeting 3ppm chlorine MINIMUM regardless of your nature2 system.

If your CYA is already at 40 since you refilled, how did it get there?

Re: Home and garden projects
 

I added stabilizer

Re: Home and garden projects
 

Funny that you mentioned the salt addition. Sister in Ft. Myers has added a water purification system to the houses water system and it uses salt to filter the water. No more stains and horrid smells to the water and it is actually good tasting.

Re: Home and garden projects
 

In the UK dishwashers have a salt compartment to make the water softer. I have never seen US dishwashers with this option.

https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.N...r=1.25&pid=1.7

Re: Home and garden projects
 

The chemistry of what goes on inside a US dishwasher is completely different from dishwashers in the UK, because of the much tighter controls on the use of phosphates in household products in the UK and Europe.

Re: Home and garden projects
 

It is usual to plumb the kitchen tap with un-softened water when using a salt-based softening system because the process works by swapping calcium ions (which come out of solution when the water gets warm and dissolved CO2 comes out of solution, causing the calcium ions to precipitate as a solid stain and eventually as solid "scale") with sodium ions from the salt. This means that although the water is "soft" is slightly salty.

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The PNW allows zero phosphates in dishwasher and laundry detergents, not sure about the UK and Europe.

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Right, but the difference in design has long been since entrenched, so a different solution (please pardon the pun :o) was required - British and European dishwashers were designed to run without phosphates, whereas American d/w detergent was designed to work in d/ws designed to run using phosphate-rich detergent.

Re: Home and garden projects
 

I hadn't really considered the lack of a salt dispenser in my dishwasher over here, but then I never used any salt in our UK dishwasher because our mains water was so incredibly soft. Where we live now the water is considered hard, but is still soft compared with the chalk filtered water I grew up with in Buckinghamshire.

Re: Home and garden projects
 

Sounds like we grew up in the same part of the country. The water did change a bit when they stopped using the spring water and used reservoir water. It used to take me a little while to get use to the amount of hand soap required changing from Chiltern Hills water to soft water.

Re: Home and garden projects
 

So the last couple evenings (of about 30 mins before I get too drenched) I've been pruning back two trees and their beds.

Tomorrow it's time to dig out the old straw like mulch before putting some new brown mulch and making them pretty again. The current mulch must be a few years old judging by how shabby it looks.