When our pool was installed a few years ago, we were told by the installer to test and monitor chlorine, alkalinity, and salt on a weekly basis. Fast forward to last summer and our blue, beautiful, shimmering pool had morphed into an ugly and chalky looking mess.

After some back and forth with the installer, it was determined that we hadn't been paying attention to the LSI of the pool water and that caused severe scaling on the gelcoat. The installer eventually offered to have the pool resurfaced with ecoFinish. The pool looks great, but now achieving and maintaining the proper LSI has become the biggest pain in my...

I've been using an LSI calculator in an effort to balance my pool, but the chemistry ranges are way off from ecoFinish's recommended ranges. Can someone please help me figure this out before I sprout anymore gray hair?

I tested my water this morning, and below are the results:
FC & TC - 0 ppm (SWG was on lowest setting, have since set it to 20%)
pH - 7.2 ppm (aimed returns up to help aerate water)
TA - 160 ppm (added 1/2 gallon of muriatic acid to start to reduction)
CH - 170 ppm
CYA - 36 ppm
Salt - 3500 ppm

I'll test again tomorrow, but any and all help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Ant

I’ll keep it simple.
I have been adherent to the TFP system ever since I restored the pool at the house I bought 12 years ago. I can’t thanks the contributors here enough for their efforts. I always find the info I need without asking questions….I am a lurker I suppose.

Here is my question, my 11 year old incandescent 500 watt r30 bulb burnt out end of season last year. Is there an equivalent (quality) led bulb with Edison base that I can simply install in the OG housing? Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
Dan

Greetings TFP SWG Gurus!

I'm looking for advice on what to do about my SWG system. I have a Circupool RJ-45 Plus unit running on my 9640-gallon pool/spa. I bought it 4x oversized based on advice I got from these forums to purposely not over-work/stress the SWG. That was great advice!

Here are my pool chemistry numbers today before I added corrective measures and opened the pool for summer:
FCL: 5.30
TCL: 5.30
pH: 8.1
ALK: 210
CH: 385
CYA: 75
SALT: 3640ppm (measured by AquaCheck strip & a calibrated Orapxi digital tester) (Circupool recommends 3000-4000ppm salt levels)
CSI: +0.78
TEMP: 76F
WATER FLOW: ~50GPM

After plugging the above numbers into TFP's pool calculator, I added 95oz of 31.45% muriactic acid to kick the pH down to 6.9 and the CSI to -0.39. Because I have a waterfall feature, the pH will always drift upwards towards pH 8.0 or so after a few days and I've done this chemistry see-saw ritual for years without issue.

After making sure the chemistry was corrected, I removed the bypass tube, installed the SWG cell, and powered it up to it's normal 35% generation. I never run the cell if the water temps are <70F, and it is disconnected after the swim season in fall. The 2-year old cell was also cleaned before installation with a ~6% muriatic acid solution for 10 minutes as it was very lightly scale contaminated from last year.

My problem is: the cell performed well at first, but shuts off with a LO SALT warning light after about 20-30 minutes. I recycled the SWG power off, then back on again - it performs well for about 20-30 minutes before throwing another LO SALT warning. After the second time it did this, I watched the digital display on the controller carefully. After a few minutes of turning the cell on, the SWG display will stabilize at ~3200ppm salt; 22.8V; 4.71A. But, as the minutes go by, the salt level will slowly creep down after 20-30 minutes, until it goes below 2900ppm, at which time the LO SALT will start flickering, then it will completely shut down as the salt level goes down <2850ppm.

I've read through some of the older forum posts and some have suggested this may be a flow switch problem, but with Circupool, the flow switch is sold as a "Generic Flow Switch" with no apparent salt measurement ability (maybe I'm wrong about that function?). This raises another question in my mind - how are salt levels measured with the Circupool system? It must be in the SWG cell itself?

I have a bunch of questions that I have no answers to: Should I kick the salt level of the pool up to the upper range - like 3800-3900ppm? Is this 2-year old cell that I have taken very good care of just dying? Or what am I missing here? Any ideas or suggestions on what I should do?

Thanks in Advance for any ideas!