Calcium flakes

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I would suggest you drain about 20% to get your salt down to your target unless you expect enough rainfall and backwashing over the season to get you there. The calcium flakes are from scaling. You need to target a negative CSI value, somewhere around -0.1. How you do it is up to you as you can play with the pH and TA to see how that affects your CSI. I don't know if you all downunder have access to boric acid but adding borates will help a lot with scaling inside the SWG cell.

As for Cu, well, if you have evidence of use than you can bet there's Cu in your water. You should find a reliable shop that can test it for you. Cu stains can be much harder to remove than iron stains, especially if they get old. Do you have access to Jack's Metal products or ProTeam's MetalMagic chemicals? They come highly recommended by many TFPers. Draining and refilling will metal free water is the only sure-fire way to get rid of the problem but there's no way to advise unless you know the extent of your metal contamination.
 
Thanks JN, council send letters when we have long showers, not sure what their reaction would be to using 20,000L ;) I will keep backwashing each time we have heavy rain and hopefully salt and CH it will drift down over time. I'm not too worried about the green staining on the pool surface (15 yr old pool), more the daughters complaints about having green hair after swimming! I will send some water to a proper lab for Cu testing to get an accurate number, I don't go into pool shops any more:pth:
 
Hi Crunchy and welcome back.
If you work on bringing that TA down it should bring you back to the slightly negative CSI range which will obviously help with your scaling. Borates seem to be fairly hard to find in Australia and you would expect that you might be able to pick them up at Bunnings or Masters. There is an Australian online supplier if your interested Boric Acid | Get rid of cockroaches and ants fast!.

Where in Queensland are you- sounds like in your in the tropics? If so the summer rains will give you plenty of opportunity for backwashing!

Unfortunately we don't seem to have anything like Jack's Magic but there is a an Australian company that have a neat little package- either you can DIY or call in one of their technicians. Although have never had the need to remove copper stains. Their website is http://www.poolstainremovers.com.au
 
Hi Jezza

No we are in Brisbane, we got a mini heat wave going on right now...thanks for the lead on borates and stain removal, I did add borates a few months ago but without a testing kit for borates I'm not sure what level is still in there, is it something that diminishes over time or is it quite stable? I have about 5Kg left over (Biguard Optimser:rolleyes:)
 
Today's results using the K2006C

FC 5.2
CC 0
pH 7.5
TA 70
CYA 60
CH 470
Salt 5000 (target 4200)
CSI -0.29

I manged to get the TA down by going hard with the acid, couple more days on aeration and the pH should be up to my target of 7.7 which will get my CSI on target (-0.1). But CH has rocketed up, I used a high quality very strong HCL (mauratic) acid I found at work, the stuff smoked when the lid came off despite being 5 years out of date! The bucket got hot with the water acid solution in it....anyway I over did it and pH went down to 6.7 which really helped get that TA down but may have put my CSI well in the danger zone (-1.02)

how quickly will out of balance CSI impact concrete? I may have been suffering from psychosomatic pool concerns but I swear the surface felt chalky and porous very quickly after that little mistake. Perhaps that's what has driven up the CH?

Anyway not much I can do now but pleased to be making progress on the TA target and all other parameters starting to look pretty good.
 
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Hi Crunchy,

I am assuming that you using the pH probe for that number of 5.5. If that number is accurate your low pH is a concern and I would suggest that you need to add some of those borates to work your pH up quicker than the aeration process but unfortunately this will drive up your TA just a little. Once your back in the 7's then you can work on your TA if you have to.

Must be getting late- you need some borax to get that pH up not borates- alternatively you get some soda ash which would be cheaper but will increase the TA much more for you to work with later on
 
Yes, dropping your pH that low can easily make water corrosive to plaster as well as heat exchangers.

You can add borax without much affect on TA. Even at 50ppm borates, the increase in TA is only a few ppm. Soda ash (sodium carbonate, also called pH-Up) will increase both pH and TA a lot.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk,16k gal SWG pool (All Pentair), QuadDE100 Filter, Taylor K-2006
 
No worries Crunchy- that's obviously good!

Keeping your pH around 7.7/7.8 should keep your CSI about where you want it with your other levels being steady.

How's the calcium flaking issue going? Once you've got your pH and TA steady you might want to consider bumping that CYA level up to 70/80 with the warmer weather setting in.
 

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Just the odd flake coming through now Jezza, really seems to have abated. Agreed, I need to add a little more "sunscreen" soon. What I am most interested in is if the TA suddenly jumps up again, unless that was just testing variability last time! Now I have the K2006C with extra reagents I have been testing testing testing, the family think I've gone mad!

Thanks for all the advice so far peoples, feels good to be in control and not stepping foot in the pool shop for months is a real bonus!
 
You should be pretty sweet with your TA of 70 assuming that it keeps your pH steady. TA will mainly rise when you refill the pool. Probably a good exercise to test your tap water to see what levels of TA and CH you are adding.
 
Naturally the 10 ml test will be less accurate but the idea is to match the resolution of the test with your practical needs.

For example, Taylor suggests a 25 ml sample for the CH test and that yields a resolution of 10 ppm. Who cares if your CH is 220 or 230?

A better idea is to use a 10 ml sample and get a resolution of 25 ppm per drop. (as in the TF-100) Now, your CH is 200 or 225 (etc) and that is about perfect as far as your practical needs and you save on reagent.
 
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