I hear you... You might want to reach out to the people at Jack's magic for figuring out a proper sequestering agent and plan. I have spoken to them (both Don and Pete) in the last week, and each of them were -extremely- helpful in helping me put a plan together to combat metals. And, yes, I hear you on the AA treatments. I've done enough myself that I have the entire process memorized and feel like I can do it in my sleep (that's not a good thing, that means I haven't yet mastered how to handle getting all the metals OUT of my pool quite yet, without the occasional "oops" where I brought metals out of solution into suspension, and therefore, staining).
Some random thoughts for you...
- CuLators can help (but only if the metals are sequestered) to remove the metals, but they probably won't get everything before staining happens.
- If you don't have a DE filter, adding DE to your sand/cartridge filters, or adding Jack's Filter Fiber should allow you to catch more of the metals due to them catching lower micron junk than a standard sand or cartridge filter can't do by itself.
- If iron/metals are coming from your auto-fill or fill water, taking steps with pre-filtering before it gets into your pool can reduce metals in your pool.
- Running polyfill in your filters helps remove some iron/metals but ONLY if its been oxidized and falls from solution to suspension (coloring your water green) but again, by that time, chances are the staining will occur before you remove ALL of it.
- A lower pH (7.0-7.4 consistently) can help will preventing staining, but if your CH is also really high, it might not help as much as you might hope because the water can only absorb so many minerals until they are filtered out. If you're NOT a plaster pool (and are fiberglass or vinyl), than this is much easier as you can keep your CH lower, as you don't care about CSI like us plaster pool people do.
- Keeping FC on the lower end (still within your FC/CYA standards) WILL help because it allows the metals to stay in solution. When your FC goes up too high, the metals go from solution into suspension and turn your water color and likely will start to stain IF you don't back them back into solution quick enough or filter them out (through your filter or polyfill) quick enough too.
- Draining water may help, but it's not a solution (more of a band aid) if metals are still getting into your pool through other means (and there's more means than JUST by auto-fills), despite what people often lead you to believe.
- Some pools (depending on design, covers, etc.) have a LOT more evaporation (or leaks even) than others, which means, more auto-filling, which again will be problematic until you address this because you'll just keep re-adding more metal into the pool/.
- On large SWG pools, salt can add metals. Even if your salt is 99% pure, when you're adding 720+ pounds of salt into a large pool, even 99% purity means alot of other Crud and metals are still getting into your pool! (this is often overlooked I think)
- AA treatments are neat, but they suck having to do mid-summer because of the havoc on the AA cancelling out your chlorine and vice versa, and for 2-4 days you might be battling getting your chlorine up, with regular FC dosing, but you CANNOT overshoot, or you'll just take all the metal and put it back into suspension. And certain sequestrants you might use (and you really do need to use them when doing an AA treatment!!), like Jack's Magenta (which is stronger than their Purple stuff) will react to Polyquat-60 (if you use that) and cause a ton of cloudiness in your pool quickly too, which can take a week or more to get out, so that's another headache.
- It can help to use Jack's sequest test kit to validate your sequestrant PPM values to make sure you HIT the right dosing for every week's maintenance dosing (which you need to do as sequestrants will break down, like most everything else) and when it does, expect problems, as I'm sure you're well aware...
- For AA treatments, you can buy 5 pounds bags of Vitamin-C for as CHEAP as $27.37 (way cheaper than pool store "treatments). so that as least LOWERS your cost when you need to do AA treatments.
(I didn't proofread this, I'm in a hurry, so if anything seems off, might be a typo)
Anyways just some random thoughts. Happy to answer specific questions you might have. I just thought a bunch of random things might be helpful to start.
J
PS - I feel your pain on this topic, I really do... and whatever more info you can share about your pool, the better. Willing to keep the discussion going. Metals is what makes me wanna fill my pool in and turn it into a mini put course. Some metal problems are SO difficult to manage, and some people just don't "get it" and how complicated it "can" be (not necessarily ALWAYS is, but keyword being "can", depending on the pool)
