I need help please.
My pool is a Doughboy Copper Canyon 16x32, 17,500 gallon (at least that's what the pool place told me), oval above ground with a 7' deep end. I am using SoftSwim, because I was dead st against chlorine, like most people I was turned off by public pools. I wanted to go with the Nature2 or a Pool Frog since they were inline solutions & seemed easier to use, but the pool place told me they were Crud & there was no better system for a pool than SoftSwim, so that's what I went with.
I have had no problems with the SoftSwim except always having to use Lo'n Slo all the time. I was told about Bioguard Optimizer plus & all the wonderful things it did & it was something I definitely wanted to do. However it was going to cost around $125 for the Optimizer Plus & then I would have to buy Lo'n Slo & Balance Paks to rebalance the Ph & TA, they estimated the total cost would be around $350.
So I started digging & ran across Waterbear's post about how you can use 20 Mule Team Borax & Muriatic Acid and accomplish the same thing. I used the calculation method that was detailed out & came up with needing 14 boxes of 20 Mule Team Borax & 4 gallons of Muriatic Acid. I did as the instructions stated & added 1/2 the amount of each (7 boxes of borax & 2 gallons of acid) directly into the return stream so it would be shot out into the pool & dispersed. I waited about 45 minutes and put the rest in the same way. I let the pump run for 48 hours & checked the levels. The Ph & TA where very high, as in maxed out on the color chart for the test strips. So I used the pool calculator & determined that I need a little over 2 gallons of Muriatic acid to bring the Ph down, which would then bring the TA down as well. So I did that & rechecked 2 hours later, the TA was perfect buy the Ph was really low. So I turned on the fountain in the pool to aerate the water so the Ph would come back up to normal. Next I checked the Borate levels with the Borate Test strips & my Borates ar 80ppm not the 50ppm they are supposed to be. So I have wasted water down to the minimum line on the skimmer & now I am refilling & will recheck the Borate levels again in about 2 hours.
My question is, did I do everything right or did I screw up? I just concerns me since I've now added 6 gallons of acid to my pool since Sunday. Acid makes me nervous.
Any feed back or help would be greatly appreciated.
