Ascorbic acid cleaning questions

[wbnethery3]

Hey all...

I posted a thread in the wrong spot last week, and an admin moved it here. Not sure if that's the best place, but that's where they put it. I had some questions that didn't get answered, but I forged ahead anyway. I've applied the first round of AA, and have a follow-up question... I'm posting this in the same forum as the "how to" thread, so hoping it gets in front of a few more eyes than that first one.

Before beginning, I had the pool at 7.2 pH and 0 FC, and I added a quart of Polyquat 60 one day ahead to be sure I didn't start getting any algae growth. I applied the first 2.2 lb (1 kg) bag to my 30 kgal by sprinkling it out around the edge of the pool, including a couple of sun ledges. That works out to 0.7 lb per 10kgal and slightly above the initial dosage recommended (0.5 lb per 10 kgal). I saw immediate lifting where the powder went into the water near horizontal surfaces (yay!), so I assume it mixes slowly and didn't diffuse much before hitting them. I waited 30 minutes and clearly lots of staining was left - especially on the walls (boo!) - so I applied the second 2.2 lb bag which I had purchased, bringing my total dosage up to 1.5 lb per 10kgal. Same thing happened again - the horizontal surfaces continued to lighten, but the walls weren't as quick. I tested the pH after that had circulated for a while, and it is around 6.8 - 7.0.

I am now circulating overnight hoping to see the rest of the staining gone tomorrow... it's going to be a bit like Christmas morning for me when I wake up. I'm asking ahead of time in the scenario where Santa leaves me a lump of coal in my stocking - if the stains aren't all gone, it's going to take me a while to obtain more AA. Should I go ahead and dose with sequestrant, or leave it as is until I get the AA?

I don't fully understand the chemistry, but I don't think the sequestrant would prevent another round of AA from doing its job down the road a few days. I'd like to start putting chlorine back in the water so we can swim, but that is only going to happen after I'm done with the AA. This is really about what the right holding pattern should be if I need more AA.

Thoughts?

 

[wbnethery3]

Well, I'm not a patient person... I updated the status of the cleaning in that other thread, but I have gone ahead and added the 2 quarts of Jack's Magic Pink Stuff since things are looking pretty good and I don't want to risk redeposition of the metals. I'm planning on partially draining and refilling once the pool looks good, but I'd like to be able to stay on top of it and make sure I'm not risking redeposition before I can do that. I noticed there's a test sold to test levels of that JMPS... anyone here used it?

 

[Strawberryshortcake]

I just wanted to share my experience with this. I got a pool with my home purchase and I had no idea it had iron until I began to deswamp (probably sat for 3-4 years). Once I started slamming the pool, it turned brown and I had stains everywhere. Like the entire pool was tinted orange which made my water look green.

I tried two AA treatments and each failed. They cleared up the stains fantastically but I could NOT come out of treatment mode. Each time required 15+ gallons of bleach to start holding chlorine, and I simply couldn’t keep up with the demand to keep the levels appropriate for instance overnight while I was sleeping and i’d wake up to 0 FC for days... so eventually algae, requiring a slam, to undo the AA treatment. This was with Poly 60 too.

The first time I got out of it, I used Metal Magic and though i had some staining back from the slam it was lessened. Metal magic held the level of staining there for a while before it started creeping up again. So i did AA again, and tried Jacks magic, which... failed within 4 days. I did not try Jacks again.

So in my research mostly on this forums I came across a post by someone that said they skipped AA all together. They JUST used metal magic. I don’t have the link at the moment but a few people said they did it too and it worked so I decided to try it. I will ONLY use this method from now on!

You don’t have to drop your chlorine level before or during nor do you need to drop you PH. you might actually need to raise it to 7.5+ because the MM will drop it. All I need to do now is pour 4 bottles of MM in the pool and the next morning all the stains are gone and my pool chemistry is not all out of whack. It doesn’t look instant results like an AA treatment, it takes overnight for me at least. By day 2 the pool will look even better. I could probably use 3 bottles but I haven’t tried that yet.

Also, I had the same experience with AA. A lot of staining went instantly but it would take overnight circulation for it ALL to disappear.

It’s so so so much easier in my opinion and if your AA treatment doesn’t work or you need to do it again I strongly recommend trying this method. It couldn’t be simpler.

In the pic below you can see my pool has a greenish tint. I didn’t treat for a while because I had to slam and the summer heat was requiring a lot of bleach and maintaining so my stains came back. As you can see my entire liner gets an orange tint.



And here is my pool just now. I actually did MM treatment over the weekend. No fuss afterwards to rebalance it’s good to go. My ph was at 7.5 and so just left my fountain on to aerate the ph up (fountain plugs into return jet).



PoolGeek sells a 12 pack of MM on Ebay for $150. It’s by far the best deal. You’ll need more then 4 (you could try 3 first), for maintaining sequester after.

 

[wbnethery3]

I just wanted to share my experience with this. I got a pool with my home purchase and I had no idea it had iron until I began to deswamp (probably sat for 3-4 years). Once I started slamming the pool, it turned brown and I had stains everywhere. Like the entire pool was tinted orange which made my water look green.

I tried two AA treatments and each failed. They cleared up the stains fantastically but I could NOT come out of treatment mode. Each time required 15+ gallons of bleach to start holding chlorine, and I simply couldn’t keep up with the demand to keep the levels appropriate for instance overnight while I was sleeping and i’d wake up to 0 FC for days... so eventually algae, requiring a slam, to undo the AA treatment. This was with Poly 60 too.

The first time I got out of it, I used Metal Magic and though i had some staining back from the slam it was lessened. Metal magic held the level of staining there for a while before it started creeping up again. So i did AA again, and tried Jacks magic, which... failed within 4 days. I did not try Jacks again.

So in my research mostly on this forums I came across a post by someone that said they skipped AA all together. They JUST used metal magic. I don’t have the link at the moment but a few people said they did it too and it worked so I decided to try it. I will ONLY use this method from now on!

You don’t have to drop your chlorine level before or during nor do you need to drop you PH. you might actually need to raise it to 7.5+ because the MM will drop it. All I need to do now is pour 4 bottles of MM in the pool and the next morning all the stains are gone and my pool chemistry is not all out of whack. It doesn’t look instant results like an AA treatment, it takes overnight for me at least. By day 2 the pool will look even better. I could probably use 3 bottles but I haven’t tried that yet.

Also, I had the same experience with AA. A lot of staining went instantly but it would take overnight circulation for it ALL to disappear.

It’s so so so much easier in my opinion and if your AA treatment doesn’t work or you need to do it again I strongly recommend trying this method. It couldn’t be simpler.

In the pic below you can see my pool has a greenish tint. I didn’t treat for a while because I had to slam and the summer heat was requiring a lot of bleach and maintaining so my stains came back. As you can see my entire liner gets an orange tint.

View attachment 115835

And here is my pool just now. I actually did MM treatment over the weekend. No fuss afterwards to rebalance it’s good to go. My ph was at 7.5 and so just left my fountain on to aerate the ph up (fountain plugs into return jet).

View attachment 115836

PoolGeek sells a 12 pack of MM on Ebay for $150. It’s by far the best deal. You’ll need more then 4 (you could try 3 first), for maintaining sequester after.

Just curious - have you ever drained and refilled? Seems like you're keeping MM in business, and it would stand to reason you're just fighting an accumulation that needs to be flushed out of the pool. I started looking at the thread linked in your signature, but it's currently 23 pages long, so I'm going to have to put that on my "interesting reading for later" list. I skipped ahead to the last page and saw that you haven't yet replaced/repaired the liner, so I assume the answer to my question is "no". I'm happy with my results so far - I posted some update pics in the other thread. Thanks for commenting and sharing your experience... I'll get caught up on your story before long and subscribe to see how it goes.

 

[Strawberryshortcake]

Just curious - have you ever drained and refilled? Seems like you're keeping MM in business, and it would stand to reason you're just fighting an accumulation that needs to be flushed out of the pool. I started looking at the thread linked in your signature, but it's currently 23 pages long, so I'm going to have to put that on my "interesting reading for later" list. I skipped ahead to the last page and saw that you haven't yet replaced/repaired the liner, so I assume the answer to my question is "no". I'm happy with my results so far - I posted some update pics in the other thread. Thanks for commenting and sharing your experience... I'll get caught up on your story before long and subscribe to see how it goes.

No. The pool came with the house, and replacing the liner wasn't something we could/can afford right now, and because of it's unknown age I won't risk draining it until I can do that (I'm sure it'll be ruined when I do).

 

[wbnethery3]

Pics of my before/after:





Not sure when I'll drain and refill... we are in a wet weather pattern right now, don't feel like risking it yet. Going to raise pH back into range and start working to get FC back up. My dilemma is my CYA is 80-90, so I'm really going to struggle to keep the pH down and maintain an effective residual until I can dump some of the water. May end up doing a partial drain this weekend just to give myself a little breathing room on the CYA. We'll see how things look on Saturday...