In case anyone has had trouble figuring out what is going on, here is my recent epic tribulations, it explains why I'm here! It is a long story, so only need to read if you can't figure out what is wrong.
I've had a great pool for years, crystal clear, and a service to take care of it. A few months ago, I noticed the guy was adding a lot of chlorine and HCA. And he commented that I must be using it a lot, sometimes when I had not used it at all.
I eventually figured out that my SCG was shot. Well 3-5 years, and I got 5 years, so that is pretty good. It was missing an entire plate once I inspected it.
So I got a new Electrolysis unit. I've been plagued with a lot of scale for a long time, and my neighbor let me to believe this is because the constant operation of the SCG requires, in a perfect world, constant addition of a little acid.
So now that my once a week chlorine treated pool got the SCG working again, I started checking chemicals. PH was nearly 8, despite the weekly dump of lots of HCA. I looked into that, and this seemed to be at least one of the reasons for tons of calcium deposits.
So I got an IntelliPH [adds acid in synchronism with the SCG, so pretty cool]. I also dumped a bunch more HCA in and got it down to 7.3. Next day it was way up again, so I have been slowly turning up the IntelliPH and adding a little HCA. So this is getting under control.
Except salt is 5500. So I calculate how much water to remove and add, and now the Salt is 3200. Yea! I also learn that adding tons of chlorine often will slowly increase the salt level, so that makes sense; now that the SCG is working, hopefully salt remains stable.
So with the PH staying around 7.3-7.4, it started snowing chunks of scale [I assume calcium]. Chunks, dust; just a whole lot of it. Some pieces as big as your toenails. Water is pretty clear.
I'm excited now; balanced PH automatically, good SWC, and I'm starting to learn about the other things [CYA, Alkalinity, etc.]. Water is nice and soft and zero eye burning! Yea!!
So then the whole system is not filtering. I had to get the pump up to 2500 RPM to just get it to flow. Gauge is unreadable on DE filter, so I decide to clean out the DE filter; assuming it is all this calcium clogging things up.
So now I'm expecting near perfection. Clean DE, good chemistry, stable PH, stable FC, just a tad high [now set on 20% vs 100%!].
But the water is really cloudy. Stays cloudy. I tried clarifier, that helped but still quite cloudy.
Pool guy comes, and says, oh that is because you need chlorine, so he dumps a bunch of chlorine, I don't understand this because it is around 5, and 3-4 is still good from what I have been reading.
And the pool is even more cloudy the next day. And now the robot cleaner is not cleaning the leaves [I get a lot of them] as well as it did.
So I turn the pump up to 2000rpm and leave it on all night. Pool still cloudy, but maybe a bit better.
Robot cleaner working even worse. So I pull the robot, pull the robot filter, and it is caked with this light brown gunk, I assume dead algae per the pool guy.
So back goes the robot with a clean filter, and man it is really back to cleaning the living heck out of the bottom, back to scrubbing the heck out of the sides/edges, etc.
And the next day the pool is less cloudy, but a noticeable amount! Robot is not working so well.
It seems obvious in retrospect; Anyway, I had noticed some plastic pieces in the DE filter when I was cleaning it; to make a long story end, the DE was leaking into the pool, getting removed by the Robot.
So the filter is really old, I'm not sure how old, I'd guess 10+ years, so I decided to replace it; and I've wanted to go up in size anyway. So A Quad DE80 is on it's way.
And other than that, Things are settling in. But I've realized I need to learn more to avoid these issues in the future.
And maybe all the scaling will stop, and possibly get reversed. Any thoughts on how to remove scaling besides draining would be interesting to me.
Sorry again for the long story! ;-)
I've had a great pool for years, crystal clear, and a service to take care of it. A few months ago, I noticed the guy was adding a lot of chlorine and HCA. And he commented that I must be using it a lot, sometimes when I had not used it at all.
I eventually figured out that my SCG was shot. Well 3-5 years, and I got 5 years, so that is pretty good. It was missing an entire plate once I inspected it.
So I got a new Electrolysis unit. I've been plagued with a lot of scale for a long time, and my neighbor let me to believe this is because the constant operation of the SCG requires, in a perfect world, constant addition of a little acid.
So now that my once a week chlorine treated pool got the SCG working again, I started checking chemicals. PH was nearly 8, despite the weekly dump of lots of HCA. I looked into that, and this seemed to be at least one of the reasons for tons of calcium deposits.
So I got an IntelliPH [adds acid in synchronism with the SCG, so pretty cool]. I also dumped a bunch more HCA in and got it down to 7.3. Next day it was way up again, so I have been slowly turning up the IntelliPH and adding a little HCA. So this is getting under control.
Except salt is 5500. So I calculate how much water to remove and add, and now the Salt is 3200. Yea! I also learn that adding tons of chlorine often will slowly increase the salt level, so that makes sense; now that the SCG is working, hopefully salt remains stable.
So with the PH staying around 7.3-7.4, it started snowing chunks of scale [I assume calcium]. Chunks, dust; just a whole lot of it. Some pieces as big as your toenails. Water is pretty clear.
I'm excited now; balanced PH automatically, good SWC, and I'm starting to learn about the other things [CYA, Alkalinity, etc.]. Water is nice and soft and zero eye burning! Yea!!
So then the whole system is not filtering. I had to get the pump up to 2500 RPM to just get it to flow. Gauge is unreadable on DE filter, so I decide to clean out the DE filter; assuming it is all this calcium clogging things up.
So now I'm expecting near perfection. Clean DE, good chemistry, stable PH, stable FC, just a tad high [now set on 20% vs 100%!].
But the water is really cloudy. Stays cloudy. I tried clarifier, that helped but still quite cloudy.
Pool guy comes, and says, oh that is because you need chlorine, so he dumps a bunch of chlorine, I don't understand this because it is around 5, and 3-4 is still good from what I have been reading.
And the pool is even more cloudy the next day. And now the robot cleaner is not cleaning the leaves [I get a lot of them] as well as it did.
So I turn the pump up to 2000rpm and leave it on all night. Pool still cloudy, but maybe a bit better.
Robot cleaner working even worse. So I pull the robot, pull the robot filter, and it is caked with this light brown gunk, I assume dead algae per the pool guy.
So back goes the robot with a clean filter, and man it is really back to cleaning the living heck out of the bottom, back to scrubbing the heck out of the sides/edges, etc.
And the next day the pool is less cloudy, but a noticeable amount! Robot is not working so well.
It seems obvious in retrospect; Anyway, I had noticed some plastic pieces in the DE filter when I was cleaning it; to make a long story end, the DE was leaking into the pool, getting removed by the Robot.
So the filter is really old, I'm not sure how old, I'd guess 10+ years, so I decided to replace it; and I've wanted to go up in size anyway. So A Quad DE80 is on it's way.
And other than that, Things are settling in. But I've realized I need to learn more to avoid these issues in the future.
And maybe all the scaling will stop, and possibly get reversed. Any thoughts on how to remove scaling besides draining would be interesting to me.
Sorry again for the long story! ;-)