3 in 1 chlorine tabs

[lilpam14]

Wondering what those on here (the ones with more knowledge than me, almost everyone) thinks about the 3 in 1 chlorine tablets vs the regular chlorine tablets? Is it really worth spending the extra money for them?

 

[pooldv]

We are not fans of tabs at all because they add almost as much CYA as they add chlorine. More here, Pool School - How to Chlorinate Your Pool

 

[tim5055]

Well, I can't find the MSDS for the 3 in 1 tabs, but I found Suncoast Complete and Suncoast Four in One and they both had nothing listed other than Trichlor in the ingredients. So, I would guess they are nothing other than Trichlor, stabilized chlorine.

You have four pools listed, all as "BBB". Do all of them have the CYA overhead to use pucks?

 

[Donldson]

The Complete tabs are 95% trichlor and 5% "Trade Secret". I have some idea what that Trade Secret might be, but I keep to the motto "when in doubt, don't use it". If you are going to use tabs just stick to the pure trichlor ones.

 

[YippeeSkippy]

I wondered if the 3rd ingredient (after chlorine and CYA) is copper? That is certainly something that should be clearly labeled, IMO. I certainly don't want it in my water.

We'll be seeing folks with sky high CYA and green hair/stains and they will have no idea that those tablets got them those problems. Oy!

 

[Donldson]

I think the Trade Secret is just sodium tetraborate, judging by advertising it is a clarifier and scale inhibitor. ProTeam does it in their High Tech tabs to try to upsell them, sounds like the same thing here. There are some advantages to that, it will help offset the acidity of the trichlor and also slowly add borates. But this is all just a guess, again it is only listed as "Trade Secret". They could just be cutting it with baking soda, like my old dealer used to

 

[lilpam14]

To be honest tim5055, I do not know what you mean by "CYA overhead to use pucks".

- - - Updated - - -

Thanks everyone for your input.

 

[tim5055]

To be honest tim5055, I do not know what you mean by "CYA overhead to use pucks".

Meaning can you afford to add the CYA to the pool the pucks bring along? If you are already at CYA 80 you have no more "overhead" to add more CYA to the pool. If you only have 30 CYA, then yes you can safely use pucks.

Not many really understand that pucks are almost half CYA. Using the 20K pools in your signature, 1 8oz puck will raise the FC by 2.7 but also raise the CYA by 1.7 It doesn't take a lot of pucks to over stabilize a pool to the extent that the chlorine is not sufficiently effective to avoid algae. From Pool School - How to Chlorinate Your Pool

Trichlor - Commonly sold as tablets or pucks that you simply put into an automatic container that passes pool water over them and they slowly dissolve - putting chlorine and CYA into your water and lowers the pH. They are incredibly convenient and incredibly insidious. The CYA that they put into your pool water doesn't get used up, and instead accumulates. Eventually the CYA level will build up to a point that renders your chlorine ineffective. Typically, everything is fine, until one day you start to develop algae and don't understand why.

 

[kimkats]

Add to this the fact the FC will go away due to the sun and swimmer load BUT the CYA stays around until you drain some water.

Kim

 

[Richard320]

To be honest tim5055, I do not know what you mean by "CYA overhead to use pucks".

- - - Updated - - -

Thanks everyone for your input.

He's talking about "room" for the CYA. Dichlor and trichlor add CYA along with the FC. The FC goes away. The CYA remains.

I hunted down an old post I've reposted many times that should explain it.

We'll take a 16000 gallon pool, because that's what I have. On a fresh fill, prominent national pool chain recommends 2.5 pounds pf stabilizer per 10,000 gallons, which works out nicely to 4 pounds which brings CYA to 30.

With an average loss of 2 PPM/Day or 14 ppm/week, I'll have added 8.6 PPM/CYA if I used trichlor pucks perfectly. And they recommend a weekly "shock" of dichlor between 5 and 10 FC.... 2-3 oz per 10,000 gallons. Split the difference; I'll add 4 oz. CYA went up another .9.

So..by the end of week one, I have added 9.5 more CYA. It is now 39.5. Mimimum FC for that is 3, so I'm probably okay.

Week two, up to 49 CYA.
Week three, 58.5. Minimum FC should be 5, but they recommend 3 as ideal, so the pool looks a bit hazy. So I'll toss in a little extra dichlor "shock" to jack FC up to 10. Which adds another 6.4 CYA. Keeping count? We're up to 64.9 now.

That caught the algae just in time.. we had two weeks of good luck. A steady diet of pucks and 4 oz. "shock" each week only added another 19, up to 73.9 now.

Week 6 it started looking funky, so we "shocked"it once again. CYA is up to 99.3. But minimum FC to keep algae at bay is 8, and we're still holding things to 3, because prominent national chain's preprinted sheet shows that as ideal. So algae got a toehold and the pool has a bit of a tint. So we throw two whole bags of dichlor in which jacks it another 7.6 by the time week 7 is over, we're at 116.4, because we had pucks in the floater the whole time.

So...in 7 weeks, from 30 to 116.4. Let's say there are no more algae outbreaks because they sold me a huge bucket of phos-free and another of yellow-out monopersulfate "shock" Nothing but the pucks and the extra 4 oz of dichlor "shock" weekly. So the next 7 weeks added 66.5, which brings the total to 182.9 CYA.

Now if we didn't understand this and things looked a bit hazy, we might throw an extra puck or two in the floater every couple weeks, which will drive it over 200 easily.​

 

[tim5055]