rdkll said:
OK, I went right to BBB and Im not sure what the cal hypo is....is that the trichlor pucks or whatever........I was afraid of raising my CYA
I will be Grasshopper.......teach me
I have some cal-hypo that was purchased at Leslie's under the name Power Powder Plus (65% cal-hypo) or Power Powder Pro (73% cal-hypo). I got a big bucket of granular stuff (the Plus) but it also comes bagged by the pound in 6 pack or 12 or 24 packs at higher prices per lb of course.
It will be with Pool Shock items. Current online price at Leslie's is $82 for 25 lbs of the Plus, $130 for 50 lbs of the Pro and $24 for 6 lbs by the 1 lb bag. I can't say how that compares to other products gotten elsewhere, I got that right as we bought the house and didn't have the time or maybe the sense to shop around at the time. Looks like the Pro was the better deal per lb but a higher investment overall.
I suppose that all the pool places will have some version of this stuff, just beware of any extra stuff you don't need. This particular product is just cal-hypo. So, it raises calcium but not CYA. That makes it something you can use sometimes, not all time. You can use bleach all the time since it does not add CYA or calcium.
And for that matter, you can use pucks, dichlor, or trichlor sometimes, not all the time, it just depends on whether you can handle the extra CYA they give you. Keep up on testing and you may eventually notice that your CYA has declined to the point that you can take advantage of the luxury of using pucks once in a while (or for vacation). Or for some reason you've drained the pool some and then both CYA and calcuim may be low, so you can get partway into range with one product then switch to another for awhile to fine tune the levels.
Just know what your calcium level is now from your testing and use the Pool Calculator to see how much cal-hypo you need, based on the % strength it is. Then go to the bottom of the page to see what amount of calcium that amount of cal-hypo adds to be sure you can deal with that addition.
So, my pool is now at about 240 ppm calcium, just out of range on the low side where 250-350 is in range, so I have no problem going back to using cal-hypo for my chlorine source. Each normal usage where I typically add about 2.5 ppm chlorine to the pool a day, which is about 1.25 cups cal-hypo (63%) adds 2 ppm to calcium. So theoretically I could go about 50 days using cal-hypo for chlorine in my pool before I was at the upper end of the range and start to worry about scaling in the pool and hot tub and had to drain water to reduce that calcium. Right now I have plenty of bleach on hand and so I use that first. Should I run out, I've got maybe 20 lbs of cal-hypo to carry me through something like a hurricane where bleach may be hard to find.