Yellow stains on stairs and liner

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hookem87

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May 12, 2014
8
St. Louis, Missouri
Hi everyone I'm new to trouble free pool. I am having a nightmare problem with what I believe to be metal stains. I bought my house in December 2013 and it came with a vinyl liner 30,000 gallon pool. It had a ripped cover and years of leaves and algae in the pool. I used this site step by step to get rid of both and had a crystal clear pool in weeks. I came home from work one day and to my dismay noticed everything white in my pool was school bus yellow. I could also see the liner was stained. I checked the forums and did the vitamin c test and determined it was metals. I then did the absorbic acid treatment and everything was great. The problem is every time I slowly add bleach back into my pool the stains all come back. I'm so stressed out over this pool and need help badly. I've spent tons of money on the absorbic acid and sequestrants. Here are my levels:
pH 7.2
Cya 90
TA 90
Fc 0


30,000 gallon vinyl liner Hayward 1.5 hp pump sand filter
 
Welcome to TFP!

How are you getting those test results? If you have been following the methods recommended on this site, you will notice that we have some specific recommended test kits.

If your reading of CYA 90 is from one of our recommended test kits, then we would advise a partial drain and refill of your pool before tackling anything else.

Also, we encourage members to add their city/state to their profile rather than just indicating "United States".
This allows us to take your climate, water prices, water hardness and water table level into account when giving advice.
 
Is there anyone else that could have tried to "help" you with the pool? Like buying and adding a product with metal in it? Most algaecides have copper so...........

Have you had the water tested for metals?

Just throwing out ideas.........

Kim
 
hookem87 said:
I've taken my water to be tested at Leslies and it didn't test positive for whatever metals they can test for.
Click to expand...

Well, they were deposited on the pool and not in the water, so they would not show up on test. Plus, pool store tests are often wrong.

I'm thinking that if you have had that much trouble, you might need to do another AA treatment, grab the stains and do a drain/refill. You would need to leave at least a foot of water in the shallow end. Essentially dumping most of the water with the metals in it. But, let's wait and see what others have to say.

What is the cost of water in your area?
 

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After using AA to remove the stains from the pool surface, you need to use sequestrant to bind up the metals so they will not immediately re-deposit as stains. Sequestrants based on HEDP, phosphonic acid, or phosphonic acid derivatives are the most effective. ProTeam's Metal Magic and Jack's Magic The Pink Stuff (regular), The Blue Stuff (fresh plaster), and The Purple Stuff (salt) are some of the top sequestrants. You can also find many other brands with similar active ingredients, some of which are noticeably less expensive.
 
They you are not using enough sequestrant, or are using the wrong brand of sequestrant. When you see the slightest sign of stains returning, you need to add more sequestrant. And you also need to add regular maintenance doses of sequestrant to maintain the sequestrant level.
 
Metal Free is not one of the sequestrants we recommend using. I strongly recommend using something based on HEDP, phosphonic acid, or a phosphonic acid derivative.

There is no reliable way of removing the metals, though there are ways that work some portion of the time. When these approaches do not work, which is fairly often, they cause the metals to redeposit as stains. The most common approach to removing metals is to rapidly raise the FC level to a quite high level, hopefully causing the metals to precipitate out in a form that can be filtered out. This of course requires that the metals be in the water, rather than already in stains, and can result in the metals simply redepositing as stains.
 
Online or in the store, the recommendations are the same. You just have to call around and see who has them.

Only partially drain your liner pool. Increments of 25% are the safest bet. A refill is a great way to rid yourself of metals, but you have to have fill water without metals or much of them to do any good. If you have another source that would be your best choice.

Metals are extremely difficult to deal with because it is so hard to remove them. Sequestrants are very expensive as you are painfully aware.
 
Since you had clear water until after you added an algaecide (from the way I read it) then that is probably the culprit, not your fill water. You'll need to get the water replaced a little at a time until you have it down enough it's not causing the staining. I would do a treatment to remove the staining and sequester it then do as big of drain/refill as you safely can. Others might recommend a different process to do it though so wait for other opinions.
 

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