NOTE: All standard disclaimers about muriatic acid safety precautions apply - they are assumed here - so they are not explicitly described in this post, which is more about curious experimental results than about anything else.
Being relatively new to pool equipment maintenance, I wasn't sure how to clean up this age-old scale on my pumps:
Having never done this before, I decided to see if pouring 28% HASA muriatic acid on the pumps would work to remove the hard-water scale:
Within seconds, almost all the whitish scale had been dissolved off the pool pump:
Leaving the old pool pump looking relatively clean and shiny again:
One unexpected problem was that, after a few hours of acid, the spray bottle mechanism inexplicably just stopped pumping.
The white tip had some kind of odd greenish color to it:
Looking closer, I noticed the o-ring was also green - so - maybe the acid attacked the rubber o-ring?
Whatever it was, it incapacitated the spray bottle - necessitating a pour instead of a light spray cleaning:
Since the pump worked so well, I tried the same acid-bath test on my pump base to see whether it would equally well remove the scale and rust:
The acid worked well to remove the white deposits on the flat part of the pump base but, inexplicably, not the rust:
Plus, it needed a few more applications to wholly remove deposits from the sides:
In addition, I was hoping (without much reason) that the acid would clear up the cloudy pump basket cover:
But, it had no effect on the clouded plastic.
Q: What do you use to clear up cloudy pump baskets?
Being relatively new to pool equipment maintenance, I wasn't sure how to clean up this age-old scale on my pumps:
Having never done this before, I decided to see if pouring 28% HASA muriatic acid on the pumps would work to remove the hard-water scale:
Within seconds, almost all the whitish scale had been dissolved off the pool pump:
Leaving the old pool pump looking relatively clean and shiny again:
One unexpected problem was that, after a few hours of acid, the spray bottle mechanism inexplicably just stopped pumping.
The white tip had some kind of odd greenish color to it:
Looking closer, I noticed the o-ring was also green - so - maybe the acid attacked the rubber o-ring?
Whatever it was, it incapacitated the spray bottle - necessitating a pour instead of a light spray cleaning:
Since the pump worked so well, I tried the same acid-bath test on my pump base to see whether it would equally well remove the scale and rust:
The acid worked well to remove the white deposits on the flat part of the pump base but, inexplicably, not the rust:
Plus, it needed a few more applications to wholly remove deposits from the sides:
In addition, I was hoping (without much reason) that the acid would clear up the cloudy pump basket cover:
But, it had no effect on the clouded plastic.
Q: What do you use to clear up cloudy pump baskets?
