Local acid wash - how to?

[shacke]

So, all season I was never able to budge a ring of scale from my pool left over from the previous winter (Scaling - does it help to add additional chemicals beyond controlling chemistry?).

I have drained the pool below the ring for the winter closing. I thought of taking a sponge and wiping Muriatic acid over the ring to remove it. Is this something that I would need to leave on, just swipe and rinse .... - anyone know?

Thanks!

 

[otter86753]

 

[shacke]

Thanks for the bump - things maybe get quiet in the off season

 

[chiefwej]

You may want to try one of these.
Amazon.com : Purity Pool OS Out Spot Stain Remover : Swimming Pool Stain Removers : Patio, Lawn Garden

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Sounds to me like you need a tile cleaning service. I had bad scale around my pool tile (and spa face) after a winter of not properly managing my pool water. I found a local company that did kierserite blasting (a modified form of soda blasting that uses magnesium sulfate). The service cost ~ $3/linear foot of tile and I only had to drain the water below the tile line (~4"). The guys was done in about an hour and my pool tile looked brand new!

You might try looking in your local area for someone that performs pool tile cleaning. Chemical removal (acid washing) with a sponge is going to take forever and it will probably be patchy at best. Sometimes old scale can become very resistant to acid as the calcium in the scale can get replaced by magnesium and other materials (like silica sand, etc) and become very hard to remove. So the sponge method might work on some lighter patches of scale, but the thicker ones will need some form of mechanical removal. Pumice stones and scrappers are not the best idea as they can scratch the glaze on tiling. Soda blasting is a better alternative because the hardness of the grit is about the same as the calcium scale but much softer than the tile glaze. So the grit blasting can be optimized to remove scale without doing any damage to your tiles.

Good luck,
Matt