Cleaning calcium from pool tile using modified Harbor freight soda blaster

[Dirk]

No salt build up should happen. There should only be minimal salt residue left in the resin. If you are getting salt it’s because you’re filling while it is regenerating and the bypass is not working right.

Sodium replaces calcium. The counter anion (negative ion) does not change.

Thanks, J.

Because I cannot control when the regeneration happens in relationship to when the auto-fill fills (because a hot day might require the auto fill to run all night, right through the regen process), I was figuring that the softener's bypass mode would allow hard water to enter the pool from time to time. That's going to happen. It'll still be better than not filling with soft water at all. I guess I'm just curious about what a softener will add in place of the minerals it filters, and what I might need to be looking out for.

But so far, I can't find a single online reference that states topping off with softwater is a bad idea...

And unless I find out otherwise: I'll just monitor salt and CH levels until one or the other is too high, then start over...

There's another wrench in the works though, I also have a whole house filter, right before the softener. So the auto fill's supply is both soft and filtered. I haven't yet tested all three for comparison: pool water, street water and filtered/soft water, to see what's really going (or not going) into my pool. I'll get to that and report back. But again, this is somewhat academic: I just test and add or replace as needed... assuming, that is, that I need not test for anything that is not covered by my K2006 and the companion Taylor salt kit.

Considering my old water was likely never tested for anything but chlorine and pH for its entire life of six years, I'm still light years ahead of what's been going on BT (Before TFP)!

 

[Dirk]

No salt build up should happen. There should only be minimal salt residue left in the resin. If you are getting salt it’s because you’re filling while it is regenerating and the bypass is not working right.

Sodium replaces calcium. The counter anion (negative ion) does not change.

I just reread this, and I misunderstood what you were explaining, hence the previous reply. I think what you're saying is, whatever the softener is doing with the salt it uses, that salt doesn't get passed on to the softened water unless there is something wrong with the softener. So it wouldn't go into the pool. I just read, and what you are saying I think, is that the softener converts calcium to sodium, and its the sodium that gets passed on. Which is what Marty was saying. I'll get sodium in my pool water, not salt. I think I also just read that sodium can cause scale, too, but is much more easily cleaned than calcium scale. Any truth to that? Whew, sorry, it sinks in slowly over here!

 

[JoyfulNoise]

The softener “exchanges” sodium for calcium ions in the pool water. For every one calcium ion absorbed by the exchange resin, two ions of sodium are released.

No, sodium compounds absolutely can not scale under normal water conditions. Sodium and pretty much all of it salts and mineral forms are HIGHLY soluble in water. Your water would have to have off-the-charts high pH, unheard of levels of dissolved sodium and boiling water temps before any sodium compound would ever scale out.

Goes to show, you shouldn’t believe anything you read in the interwebs.....oh wait

 

[Dirk]

OK, good to know. Sounds like I should stop worrying about my soft fill water!

Though now you've got me envisioning setting up a dedicated softener and just pumping pool water through it, in a closed circuit, to reduce CH! Let it discharge down a hole somewhere...

Over thinking again, of course. Some sort of periodic water change is probably good for more reasons that just CH, right? So obsessing over increasing levels of this or that is probably pointless, since some new water once every few years would be good maintenance. (It's significantly cheaper doing that than replacing plaster!) So, too, would be one of those RO services.

Goes to show, you shouldn’t believe anything you read in the interwebs.....oh wait

Ha, exactly! The proof will be in the pudding!

But you brought up something I wanted to mention somewhere, to someone (though it'll be buried pretty well, here in this thread). One of the things I most appreciate about this site, is the consensus. Unlike most forums, discussing just about anything, it's very frustrating to go through the posts and back to back there will be 180° opinions. One guy is dead sure about something, next guy is dead sure the first guy is dead wrong! Making it virtually impossible to figure out any sort of truth. Of the TFP forum posts I've read so far, nobody seems to be disputing the underlying science/philosophy of TFP. It feels to me like there is a solid consensus, backed up by a lot of people using it, successfully, over some number of years, which gives me great confidence I'm in the right place. I'll know for sure in about 15 or 20 years if my brand new pebble still looks like it does today!!

 

[JoyfulNoise]

We all read the same propaganda and, when you’re part of a cult, agreement comes easily .... as long as everyone realizes I’m right and their wrong then we can all get along....

Oh, and you can’t hook a softener up to a pool, the chlorine would destroy the exchange resin. That’s why your softener has a GAC and spun-fiber pre-filter, it removes chlorine compounds and sediment.

 

[Dirk]

Aaaah, I agreeeeee, but dooooon't know whyyyyyy......

And thanks for ruining my latest invention, man!

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Flat roof, gutters, downspouts and rain barrels. Rain water has zero CH. Use rain water collection and you can easily control CH levels.

 

[Dirk]

Flat roof, gutters, downspouts and rain barrels. Rain water has zero CH. Use rain water collection and you can easily control CH levels.

Huh. I have two corrugated patio covers very near the pool, mostly flat, painted, only a couple years old. With gutters and downspouts, too. I could easily divert those directly into the pool in the winter, let the overflow run out the pool's overflow system. It'd be, in essence, just routing extra rain run off right through my pool, which would then cycle CH water right out of it. Would anybody do it like that? I wouldn't want to run the water off my tile roof into the pool like that, too much crud up there. But the painted metal roofs are pretty clean. Would you filter it first, somehow? Or let the pool equipment deal with that?

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Roof to pool is fine, no need to filter it. Just let the pool filter handle it. It’s better to drain the pool down an inch or two and let the rain fill it back up. Then circulate the pool water and do it again. Just letting the fill run out of the overflow will likely have little impact on the pool water. Rain water is lower density (lower TDS) than pool water and so, with little mixing, the low TDS rainwater will simply float on the surface and run out. There might be some minimal mixing and diffusion, but not enough to have a very big impact. If you could run the rain water into a skimmer and let the pump pull in and mix the the water a bit, that would work better.

 

[Dirk]

Right, like an inversion layer I see while scuba diving.

One of my unanswered questions here was about dumping an inch or two of water then letting the soft water auto fill replace it. Repeating as necessary as a way to bring down CH. My city water is CH350. My softener water is CH60. I'm curious if an inch at a time, and the resulting tweak to other chem levels, would be worth the trouble, or the wear and tear on my softener.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Your pool’s surface area is roughly 76,608 square inches. 1” of water represents roughly 332 gallons of water. You’d only want to drain and refill if you can do so without triggering a regeneration on the softener.

As long as you don’t need to do it too often, it’s just wear & tear on the softener, salt & water costs.

 

[Dirk]

Your pool’s surface area is roughly 76,608 square inches. 1” of water represents roughly 332 gallons of water. You’d only want to drain and refill if you can do so without triggering a regeneration on the softener.

As long as you don’t need to do it too often, it’s just wear & tear on the softener, salt & water costs.

And there's the rub. My auto fill is basically toilet guts. It's such a tiny stream of water. Marty once told me his pool loses an inch a day, and thought I might too in my area. I've never monitored it, but I'd expect my auto fill is running quite a lot in the summer. Is the concern about running it through the regen cycle the bypass, and auto-filling city water during that time? Or is it more than that? If it takes the auto-fill hours and hours to replace that 1", wouldn't the, what 60-90 minutes for regen be not that big a deal?

I'm sure there's math to figure out how 332 gallons of CH60 would affect 12300 gallons of CH350, but I don't know it.

And there's also pool salt and CYA to consider. That's why I wondered if any of this is worth the trouble.

I can see how the rainwater is the way to go, for multiple reasons... free, pure, CH-zero!

 

[Wrinkled fingers]

My pool went from 3500 PPM salt to off the scale (over 8000PPM) in 5 years using only soft water

 

[Wrinkled fingers]

Since my pool is soft water filled, the water softener tells me how many gallons a day on the average i use. I figured out i was using 80 gallons a day mid summer here in Phoenix in my 14000 gallon pool to keep filled. As soon as I put the cover on, my water dropped instantly the 80 gallons mentioned.

 

[Dirk]

My pool went from 3500 PPM salt to off the scale (over 8000PPM) in 5 years using only soft water

Wow! That's one of the water-replacing factors I'm trying to get a handle on, I guess. Any way to know if that would have been better or worse without the soft water? Do you think the soft water directly increased the salt level? Everyone is telling me no, that won't happen. Is that what you're suggesting? Or was your increase due to other factors (salt in the supply water that goes through the softener unchecked) that would have done that to your water even without the softener?

- - - Updated - - -

Come to think of it, my pool, before conversion to SWG, had almost enough salt in it to be SWG ready. Nobody seemed to know how it got in there. The city water tested at about 500ppm. I wonder if the high salt level was just a result of it's 6-year life. That nobody added salt, that it just built up through evaporation.

And I have a whole-house filter in line with the softener. I still have to test the water to see if that's blocking any salt or TA...

 

[Wrinkled fingers]

I can only say what happened to me, my soft water only refill did add to my salt level. My salt did go up by more than double in five years and my soft water system is new and working fine. I drained and refilled the pool recently and used nothing but soft water to start (used too much, CH too low) and with the pool 1/3 full, my salt was at only 100 ppm. I think there is still a small residual of salt on the soft water beads that does come through the tap and over 5 years of evaporation and refill, the salt builds faster than you would think. Like my previous post, I am evaporating 80 gallons a day most of the year.
I don't think a filter will filter out salt, only a Reverse osmosis i believe. I am going to deal with it by draining more during the monsoon season here.

 

[Dirk]

Well, as Marty reminded me in another thread, I'm over thinking on most of my post questions. The bottom line is, now that I am monitoring my water myself, I'll just see what happens and act accordingly. No matter what happens over time, I'll take care of it this time around, in time, instead of watching my plaster fall off!

But the way my brain works, I can't always just "accept" things and have to pick at 'em for a while...

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Sorry to put my foot down here folks but water softeners DO NOT ADD SALT to water. They exchange calcium ions with sodium ions. That IS NOT the same as adding salt. The salt, or brine tank, is merely a reservoir of sodium ions used for regenerating (removing the calcium ions from) the exchange resin. Once the resin is regenerated, the brine is flushed out of the tank and, in some softeners, a quick rinse of the resin is run. There is only very small residual of salt in the resin bed after regeneration.

Salt from a softener can get into the water supply under two circumstances - the softeners bypass valve during regeneration is faulty OR your softener is undersized relative to your household use rate and it is regenerating too frequently. In both of those instances, residual salt left in the resin after regeneration is adding salt to your water.

Once again, softeners DO NOT ADD salt. That’s simply not how these devices work.

Dirk, you had high salinity because your pool was fed a steady diet of tablets. Chlorine, when it oxidizes stuff or sanitizes pathogen converts into chloride. Therefore every chlorine pool is a salt water pool as chloride levels will always increase unless you are actively draining water and replacing it. It is not at all unusual when people convert to an SWG from years of manual chlorination to have chloride levels high enough to operate an SWG or be very best operational levels.

 

[Dirk]

Once again, softeners DO NOT ADD salt. That’s simply not how these devices work.

Dirk, you had high salinity because your pool was fed a steady diet of tablets. Chlorine, when it oxidizes stuff or sanitizes pathogen converts into chloride. Therefore every chlorine pool is a salt water pool as chloride levels will always increase unless you are actively draining water and replacing it. It is not at all unusual when people convert to an SWG from years of manual chlorination to have chloride levels high enough to operate an SWG or be very best operational levels.

Thank you, Matt. All makes perfect sense!

 

[Dirk]

Well, I'm now running half of my roof and half of my patio covers into the pool. I'll let you all know how it works out. So far, too soon to tell. I measured CH before and after a rain, and I think it went down, but I'm pretty bad at the CH test, so who knows. I let out some water just before the rain, and the gutters filled it right back up. So I know some morsel of CH drained out. Of course, so did my CYA, so there's that. (And I'm even worse at the CYA test!) But it's only rained once here in central-CA this year, so this is all kind'a moot.

But I'm gunna stick to my guns for a while. Replacing pool water with rain water, and replacing evaporation with soft water. Can't hurt, I figure. And if it gets me an extra year or two between water changes, then I'm good with that. Now that everything is in place, it's not really any extra work (and the only expense is the extra salt for the softener, which is cheap).

Roof to pool is fine, no need to filter it. Just let the pool filter handle it. It’s better to drain the pool down an inch or two and let the rain fill it back up. Then circulate the pool water and do it again. Just letting the fill run out of the overflow will likely have little impact on the pool water. Rain water is lower density (lower TDS) than pool water and so, with little mixing, the low TDS rainwater will simply float on the surface and run out. There might be some minimal mixing and diffusion, but not enough to have a very big impact. If you could run the rain water into a skimmer and let the pump pull in and mix the the water a bit, that would work better.​

Just a thought, I didn't address this before 'cause it made sense to me at the time. But when I was "pre-draining" my pool for the first rain, something occurred to me. While my overflow drain is at the level of the surface, it's enclosed in a little tank with the auto fill. And that connects to the pool though a pipe that returns at the same depth as the other returns, which are all about 18" below the surface. So technically, as the pool filled with rain water, the overflow pipe would actually be taking water from 18" below the surface, 16-17" below the rainwater inversion layer, which would be the "CH water." I'm not disputing that emptying the water before a rain would be more effective, merely pointing out that should I forget, or be unable to, the added rain water would still displace a lot of the "CH water" (in my pool, anyway)...