Lesson Learned....

[stevenbrla]

Lesson: If you keep adding chemical, and your test continues to show no change, at some point you need to doubt your test.


New pool. New test kit.

Not using salt yet.

Add calculated volume of bleach. A little change, up to .5 ppm.

Continuing to add cya, meanwhile adding more bleach.

And more bleach.

And more bleach.

Still .5 ppm Cl.

Wife: I'm beginning to doubt our test kit. I'm going to WalMart and buy another kit or more reagent.

New kit: Well over 5 pmm Cl. (last night)

This morning: Report from her lab: Well over 5 ppm


Evidently Cl reagent can go bad (or if not bad, at least neutral... which is.... bad), and sometimes does. Know that.

Steve

 

[JohnT]

Congratulations on passing your class in "Learning, the hard way." Whenever chemicals don't do what I think they should, I try adding them to a bucket of water and testing that. The small scale lets me make big changes in levels easily to see if things make sense.

 

[stevenbrla]

yep... my wife mentioned that she had meant to try adding a drop of bleach to the test to see the reaction... but it had slipped somehow....

must've slipped between doing the laundry, cooking dinner, work... or one of those cracks...


my naive self never doubted the test.

 

[rimshaker]

When you said "new kit," you meant the TF100 sold here or a walmart kit? In the case of walmart kits, who knows how long they've been sitting in storage and/or on the shelves.

 

[CaOCl2]

Quick tip: The R-0002 reagent coming out of the bottle should be a clear liquid. If it's pink or wine color it has oxidized and should be discarted.

 

[stevenbrla]

The walmart one was the accurate one in this case.