Need help with Calcium Hardness

[jdwolf]

First time posting...so let me first say thanks for all the valuable information contained in the forum. Just bought a house with a pool and was completely clueless. Pulled the cover off the pool to find a green mess. So of course I headed out to the pool store and did everything they suggested...spent over $500 and it did NOTHING (other than make my wallet lighter). Found this site and began reading everything I could, used the calc and picked up some bleach, now less than a week later the pool is CLEAR!! Just received my TF-100 test kit in the mail today, and seem to have a problem with my CH.

FC = 12.5
CC = 1.5
PH = 7.8
TA = 180
CYA = 35
CH = 1100 (did the test twice because it was so high)

The water looks super clear and feels great, should I be concerned?


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[duraleigh]

Welcome to the forum. :lol:

Yeah, your CH is really up there. It can be managed usually in a vinyl pool by keeping your pH and TA lower than you currently have it.

I would suggest you lower your pH to around 7.5 and keep it there....you certainly don't want it any higher.

That will lower your TA somewhat when you do that and that's good, too. I would suggest you lower your TA even further down to around 90-100 and keep it there as well.

When you get a chance, test the CH in your fill water and report. That is really high and I hope your fill water will help you bring it down.

Now, you didn't ask this but your CC of 1.5 indicates the need to SLAM the pool. Since your water looks so nice, I am going to suggest you hold on that for now but keep your FC up high where it is for now and then do these tests again in a couple of days and report the results. You may need to SLAM but let's wait a while....you want the cc's test to return no higher than .5 ppm.

 

[jdwolf]

Thanks duraleigh for the quick reply! I'm doing the OCLT tonight to make sure everything is gone, now that I've got the TF-100 to tell me exactly what the FC is. It's amazing the difference a quality test kit is.

Do you think the high CH could cause this?

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[jblizzle]

Welcome to TFP!!!

What is that in the 2nd picture? wrinkles?

I am going to guess that the previous owners used a lot of cal-hypo powdered chlorine (or maybe the pool store sold you a pile of it too?) and that contributed to the high CH. Since you CYA is reasonable, maybe ALL they used was cal-hypo.

Only way to lower it would be to drain and replace some water ... would have been nice to know that before you cleared it up.