Hey all,
We recently bought a pool for the kids. 16' 48" deep intex pool. Foolishly I bought a salt water system for it thinking that meant no chemical maintenance required. I had a large pool growing up and I have many memories of tubs full of various chemicals and test kits and a lot of time getting the water right.
We went to the local pool store to pickup salt and were informed there is still a bit more too it, maybe not as much as when I was a kid, but some. We were told to just bring a water sample back and they would tell us what chemicals we need.
We returned the next day and someone else at the store checked the sample and told us to put three gallons of muriatic acid in. This seemed odd to me I remember on a much larger pool adding fairly small amounts of chemicals at a time. I thought maybe this was just part of getting the water going the first time.
Anyway we dump the acid in and check the water the next day and everything is waay off. The test strips didn't seem to develop at all.
So we took another sample back and explained the situation. Apparently the person who read our water last time didn't know what they were doing. The pool store sold us two tubs of Alkalinity plus, giving us one for free for the trouble.
Things do seem to be getting closer to OK on the test strips. The chlorine is still way low and we have been running the salt system on boost to try and raise it up.
Right now the water is looking really green, and we have been washing tons of brown rusty stuff out of the filter.
I am wondering if all this acid has damaged the filter/salt system/liner etc? How would I know? I've read that the salt system has metal plates coated with something (I don't remember exactly) that allows the salt to be converted to chlorine. Could the acid have eroded this in two days?
We recently bought a pool for the kids. 16' 48" deep intex pool. Foolishly I bought a salt water system for it thinking that meant no chemical maintenance required. I had a large pool growing up and I have many memories of tubs full of various chemicals and test kits and a lot of time getting the water right.
We went to the local pool store to pickup salt and were informed there is still a bit more too it, maybe not as much as when I was a kid, but some. We were told to just bring a water sample back and they would tell us what chemicals we need.
We returned the next day and someone else at the store checked the sample and told us to put three gallons of muriatic acid in. This seemed odd to me I remember on a much larger pool adding fairly small amounts of chemicals at a time. I thought maybe this was just part of getting the water going the first time.
Anyway we dump the acid in and check the water the next day and everything is waay off. The test strips didn't seem to develop at all.
So we took another sample back and explained the situation. Apparently the person who read our water last time didn't know what they were doing. The pool store sold us two tubs of Alkalinity plus, giving us one for free for the trouble.
Things do seem to be getting closer to OK on the test strips. The chlorine is still way low and we have been running the salt system on boost to try and raise it up.
Right now the water is looking really green, and we have been washing tons of brown rusty stuff out of the filter.
I am wondering if all this acid has damaged the filter/salt system/liner etc? How would I know? I've read that the salt system has metal plates coated with something (I don't remember exactly) that allows the salt to be converted to chlorine. Could the acid have eroded this in two days?