Recent content by Hilton

Oh, I forgot about that! Old information. Just 2 now. Back then I hired someone else to do the closings.

Last year, I blew out a 170,000L pool (10' deep at main drain) using the exhaust of a Ridgid 6HP shop vac. I wasn't totally confident in it, especially since I re-used old duck plugs, a type of plug I'm not fond of to begin with, but luckily no issues seem to have come of it, there was no...

How necessary are ice compensators in in-ground, painted or tiled concrete pools? (some painted with a tile border, some tiled throughout). Winters here have an average of night-time low of -4C for three months, with occasional night-time drops to -10C and the occasional cold snap of -20C for a...

I have a small pool and large hot tub on the roof of a four-storey building. The pool is about 3200 US Gallons (6'x20') and the hot tub around 1500 US gallons (8'x8'). These pools are concrete and completely tiled. I've always wondered what the best thing to do with them in the winter is -...

I have an issue where some amateurs painted a 12" stripe around the an in-ground pool ... using the same paint they used on the pool. It is very slippery when wet. The surface is aggregate concrete; sandblasting off the paint is a possibility next year, albeit with a good chance of ruining the...

Done again today (had to drain the pool halfway to drop CYA, and the incoming water has very low TA). This is the same pool, where I have a (hopefully accurate) known size and am "testing" this method to make sure I'm doing it right and getting a good result before using it to determine the size...

I'll run the test again shortly - due to high CYA, after this long weekend I have to dump half the water in both of the pools. One I have a 'defined' size for (as specified by the original engineer, I'm sure he must be close), so it's a good one to test the calculation against. Both of the pools...

Yes, but the calculation is 71400 * (pounds added) / (alk increase) - the emphasis is in adding an exact known amount, hence why I used a scale instead of the typical weight to volume conversion.

I've been trying to determine the sizes of a large kidney shaped pool (pool "A"). I have a similar pool at the site next door for which I do have data, so I thought I'd test calculation methods based on it. Here's what I got on that pool (pool "B"), and I can't figure it out. According to the...

Thanks for the info, chem geek. I was aware of it, but I was unsure if someone made a special puck. There are some non-standard pucks out there, so you never know until you ask. Unfortunately, these locations don't have the money to spend on extra equipment, nor could I mount it legally. As it...

I have a couple of pools that operate solely on chlorine pucks. My problem is that so many pucks are needed to keep the FC levels maintained in these pools that the CYA level jumps much too quickly. During a typical week we might use as many as 15 pucks (3 kilograms of pucks) to keep the FC...

Anecdotal, but helpful information from the commercial side of things. The health authorities around here will shut down a pool at 10ppm, no matter what the CYA. (Although CYA is also legally limited to a range of 30-80). I personally operate with nominal ranges of 2-4 or 3-5 depending on the...

Sorry this isn't an answer to your question, but ... If you have that much trouble with pH, you might want to consider adding borates to the pool. I've got a couple pools where the pH is constantly rising, and will exceed 7.8 if not treated twice a week to bring it down to 7.5. I started using...

What about the white spa hose? Less flexible. The alignment between the two ends will be tricky to do with straight PVC.

Alright. I think I'm mostly concerned about the piece of spa hose now. It goes absolutely nuts when I open the heater bypass (due to the flow increase), and I worry that my glue job won't hold.