Adding 20-30 gallons of bleach per week. How to save money?

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L

ltfdrebbin

0
Jun 28, 2014
60
Kent, Ohio
Pool Size
42000
Surface
Plaster
Chlorine
Liquid Chlorine
This is our 2nd year with a pool. The people on this forum have helped turn my green pool into a crystal clear pool both summers. I'm very grateful. I also feel that next year I will have a much better understanding of how to not let my CYA get too high by using chlorine bleach instead of Trichlor or Dichlor, so I can keep my FC lower, which will consume less chlorine.

Right now, our CYA is 80, so I've been keeping my FC at 12. At this level, I've been adding about 3 gallons of bleach per day. This is getting to be a real pain to buy, transport, and dispose of 20-30 gallons of bleach every week. Additionally, it is costing $50- $75 weekly.

So- any ideas on what I could do differently? Buy bleach in 55 gallon drums? Switch to SWG? Drain and refill the pool and get CYA to 30 and keep it there? Any other ideas?

I've got an ozonator. Should I turn that off?

Being that the pool is only 2 years old, I'm reluctant to throw out any of our equipment, and switch, but if switching to SWG is the answer, let's hear it.

Thanks,
Sam
 
3 gal of 8.25% is 5.7ppm of FC which is a little high. I doubt you will get it much lower than about 2 gal per day. Yes, turning off the ozone will help, it consumes FC. Switching to a higher percentage product like 10% liquid chlorine or 12% liquid shock could help if the price works out. Some pool stores refill 2.5 gallon jugs cheaper. Not sure what is available in your area.

A Pentair Intellichlor IC60 saltwater chlorine generator would eliminate it altogether. And your Easytouch can control it.
 
Hi Sam. We just went through the drain and refill process early this summer because our pool had a CYA of 200! We couldn't understand why our pool would not hold chlorine. Needless to say, we have learned a ton here.

So we went ahead and did several partial drain and refills until we got our CYA to about 45. We were going through about 98 to 141 oz of bleach a day. I think I was overshooting the maximum a little just to be safe. Then I tested my CYA again and it was down to about 30. So I readjusted and shot for a maximum chlorine of 4 instead of 7 or 8. Now I am using around 42 to 56 oz of bleach each day (more when used a lot) and my pool is still sparkling clean! So I have found it is using much less bleach with the lower CYA. But I was even thinking I should raise the CYA a little bit to about 40 or 50 and see what happens. Not sure about that yet. I was also wanting to find the best CYA level for the least bleach expense. Three gallons a day is not cheap and I would be looking for a way to lower those costs also.

But your pool is much larger than ours also. Just wanted to tell you a little about our experience with the different CYA levels. But I am still learning. :) So I'm sure someone with a LOT more knowledge than myself will be along to answer your questions. Good luck!
Sherry
 
Turn off the ozonator since ozone reacts with chlorine using it up.

Your chlorine demand is around 7 ppm FC per day which is quite high. Part of the reason is targeting 12 ppm FC. The minimum at 80 ppm CYA is 6 ppm and that would lose about half as much but that would be 3.5 ppm FC per day which with 80 ppm CYA is still a bit high so that could be the ozone.

If you want to not buy, carry, and use as much chlorine then of course an SWG will generate it for you. If you want to manually dose then the only way to use less chlorine than the 6 ppm FC minimum at 80 ppm CYA would be to use supplemental products to control algae, but that's extra cost. So you might save as much as half on the amount of chlorine (roughly one-fourth from where you are now) but it may cost more in algaecide or phosphate remover and it's of course more complicated. For larger pools, an SWG's convenience really starts to shine.
 
To add to what everyone else said, you also have a lot of water at 42,000 gallons which will require more chlorine to maintain your FC level.

If you can get your CYA down, you will use MUCH less chlorine to maintain your FC.
 
In Ohio, I would say that a CYA of 40-50 would be more ideal for lowering chlorination costs. I go through about 30-40 ounces of 12.5% bleach each day in my pool, which is slightly smaller than your pool. My pool is not used as much as yours from the sound of it.

The ozonator is not helping the cause either. It's just not necessary and it's increasing chlorine demand. As others have said, adding the SWCG would eliminate the daily dosing all together.
 

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Divin Dave said:
If you can get your CYA down, you will use MUCH less chlorine to maintain your FC.
Click to expand...

That isn't true if the main loss of chlorine is from sunlight. Yes, the FC target should be lowered because it's currently too high and the loss will be less at a lower FC, but at the same FC/CYA ratio there is LESS chlorine loss from sunlight at higher CYA levels. This is because of a CYA shielding effect.

I would turn off the ozonator and only raise the FC to 9 ppm and see if it drops to 6 ppm. That would be a 3 ppm FC per day loss compared to the current 7 ppm FC per day loss. If the CYA is lowered to 50 ppm with a 4 ppm FC target, the FC loss may be higher from more loss in sunlight. See the table in this post for an example in SWG pools. Of course, this all presumes that the chlorine loss is mostly from sunlight. If it is from other sources, then having the same FC/CYA ratio at a lower CYA level probably won't change the chlorine loss rate.

After the ozonator is off and the FC target lowered, then one can see if changing the CYA helps, but that can be done over time with water dilution.
 
Oops, cross post, but yes the higher above your target fc level the faster that fc will get burned off. Turn off ozone, lower your target and do an oclt every week until you're confident it is stable. The oclt is less evident at maintenance fc levels so a loss of 1 overnight is definitely an issue. But the reagents for more frequent oclt testing will cost less than all that bleach
 
Are you in full sun each day?

My pool at a cya of 80 will sometimes use 3ppm per day on sunny days (its in full sun from 11-5 pm.

I found a way to reduce my chlorine consumption massively...in fact over the last two days I have lost
maybe 1ppm in full sun.

the solution?

blue solar cover. It's blocking the UV rays so I might be adding 1 gallon of bleach per week now
with no bather load. thanks to the cover.

I'm also not losing any water to evaporation....with the cover off, I had to top the pool off
every 7 days.
 
layla2052 said:
Wow... that's a lot of bleach per day. Could there be something in there that's consuming the chlorine besides sunlight? What are your test results?
Click to expand...

I work hard to keep all leaves and debris out of the pool. Of course, the winds do blow, so we do get stuff in there, but typically I, or our automatic pool cleaner get it out ASAP.
 
chem geek said:
Turn off the ozonator since ozone reacts with chlorine using it up.

Your chlorine demand is around 7 ppm FC per day which is quite high. Part of the reason is targeting 12 ppm FC. The minimum at 80 ppm CYA is 6 ppm and that would lose about half as much but that would be 3.5 ppm FC per day which with 80 ppm CYA is still a bit high so that could be the ozone.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the knowledgeable comments. If I change my FC target to 6, and still lose 3.5 per day, do I end up growing algae at that level- or even lower if we have a lot of swimmers on a sunny day?

I also appreciate the comments on the SWG. I'll be doing more research on this for next summer.
 
JVTrain said:
In Ohio, I would say that a CYA of 40-50 would be more ideal for lowering chlorination costs. I go through about 30-40 ounces of 12.5% bleach each day in my pool, which is slightly smaller than your pool. My pool is not used as much as yours from the sound of it.

The ozonator is not helping the cause either. It's just not necessary and it's increasing chlorine demand. As others have said, adding the SWCG would eliminate the daily dosing all together.
Click to expand...

I've turned off the ozonator, and would love to get to the point of only using 40-40 ounces daily! Even double the with more swimmers would be ok by me.
 

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