Recent content by DonQ

Borate test strips will give a pink color for 0 ppm borate. Perhaps your strips are defective.

I received bad taylor borate strips from tftestkits, but they declined to replace them.

I have a Hayward SumXL140 heat pump. The main power switch on the front of the unit is stuck and will not move to turn off and on. Is it hard to replace? I have moderate mechanical skills (I can assemble most Ikea items without swearing or bloodshed). Is it something I should try to do?

Mine was 45F when I opened this week. The good side of that is that the water was crystal clear, just a lot of worms and some dirt on the bottom!

I use about 5 or 6 gallons.

I don’t mean ethylene glycol based antifreeze, I’m talking about ethanol (ethyl alcohol) based antifreeze. Some are advertised as being for pool use and I was wondering if anyone had experience with them.

Does anyone have experience with ethanol-based antifreeze? I have been using propylene glycol-based in the past and have had some issues with high chlorine demand on startup.

walmart has 10#/$26 with free shipping

I would like to thank all the forum and pool school experts over the years for their great advice which helped us recover from the hurricane quickly.. We lost power for seven days and there was a lot of debris and dirt blown into our pool. After years of lugging jugs of liquid hypochlorite we...

Extra effort, complicated? No more complicated than eyeballing a meniscus: 1. Put cylinder on scale 2. Turn on scale 3. Fill with sample water.

I'm a little surprised at the negativity here. I was an analytical l chemist in my former life and I always tried to reduce unnecessary error if possible. If 'meh' precision is good enough why not just use test strips?

I realize that many tests have some variation, but when comparing results, especially when looking for trends, reducing some of that variability would be a good thing. Reading sample volume by eye is one source of variability. I have a small pocket scale (200 gm, 0.01 gm readout) that I use to...

That's not my issue, I'm just looking for borax.

I can't find boxes of borax at any of my local stores. Is there a shortage?

1 gallon of 12.5% at Namco (stores in CT, MA and NH) for $2.99 Code 18184 (July 3 2018)