I need some help from some more experienced pool owners.
In the past few weeks I've started having a ton of white flakes coming out of my returns - primarily coming out of the last return on the line which is one over my steps and unfortunately the hardest place to vacuum them off. I've definitely experienced this random times before in the last couple of years but each time The salt cell was dirty and cleaning it solved it for a long time.
Salt cell was clean when we opened the pool in April. I cleaned it again a couple weeks ago shortly after I started having trouble with the flakes. It was surprisingly clean at the time. It only had a couple of little spots of buildup on the edges.
Nothing in my tests seems to be out of range to my knowledge in a way that would cause this. I have even went to the local pool store that I actually trust to have accurate results (and never tries to upsell me on anything more than I come in to buy), trust based on taking water with me anytime I am going in anyway and comparing with what I get with my own kit.
The guy at the store seems to be pretty knowledgeable and I asked him he had any suggestions about the current flake situation. He said he couldn't see anything that really stood out to him that would cause as much as I am seeing. He did mention that sometimes you might want to decrease alkalinity and increase calcium to get a better balance even though the CSI I typically have is pretty close to zero.
I've never really worried about calcium because I have a fiberglass pool and essentially every single person has told me not to worry about that. It is on the low end though around 220, and I'm pretty shocked about that considering our local water source that we use in our pool is notoriously hard.
The only change right before we started to see the flakes was adding salt to the pool. It was understandably low when we opened this season and we increased from just over 2,000 to 2,600, and then recently added enough to get it up to the 3,000 we usually shoot for.
The flakes actually started the day after we did the initial salt addition this year. I know this obviously has something to do with salt cell process because they don't come out when it's off. But there has to be a way to fix this, right?
In the past few weeks I've started having a ton of white flakes coming out of my returns - primarily coming out of the last return on the line which is one over my steps and unfortunately the hardest place to vacuum them off. I've definitely experienced this random times before in the last couple of years but each time The salt cell was dirty and cleaning it solved it for a long time.
Salt cell was clean when we opened the pool in April. I cleaned it again a couple weeks ago shortly after I started having trouble with the flakes. It was surprisingly clean at the time. It only had a couple of little spots of buildup on the edges.
Nothing in my tests seems to be out of range to my knowledge in a way that would cause this. I have even went to the local pool store that I actually trust to have accurate results (and never tries to upsell me on anything more than I come in to buy), trust based on taking water with me anytime I am going in anyway and comparing with what I get with my own kit.
The guy at the store seems to be pretty knowledgeable and I asked him he had any suggestions about the current flake situation. He said he couldn't see anything that really stood out to him that would cause as much as I am seeing. He did mention that sometimes you might want to decrease alkalinity and increase calcium to get a better balance even though the CSI I typically have is pretty close to zero.
I've never really worried about calcium because I have a fiberglass pool and essentially every single person has told me not to worry about that. It is on the low end though around 220, and I'm pretty shocked about that considering our local water source that we use in our pool is notoriously hard.
The only change right before we started to see the flakes was adding salt to the pool. It was understandably low when we opened this season and we increased from just over 2,000 to 2,600, and then recently added enough to get it up to the 3,000 we usually shoot for.
The flakes actually started the day after we did the initial salt addition this year. I know this obviously has something to do with salt cell process because they don't come out when it's off. But there has to be a way to fix this, right?
