Automatic Chlorinator during heavy usage and summer.

[Guest]

The neighboring homeowners association I live in has a pool and it has an automatic tablet chlorine dispenser and they have had their pool shutdown twice now since Memorial day by the health department because of low chlorine levels.

Is there a way to change the amount of chlorination from these units (bigger orfices or tubing)?

I suggested they hire and train a local teenager to test (with the TFP test kit, of course) and add bleach as necessary to supplement it during heavy usage and summer. This will prevent the excessive addition of CYA and be less expensive than the trichlor tabs.

I prefer the peristatic liquid feed using bleach (since you can adjust that easily), but they are not probably going to spend extra money at this point.

 

[JasonLion]

Automatic chlorinators are somewhat adjustable. Assuming it is already turned up as high as it can go, the next step would either be to get a second one or to manually supplement with additional chlorine as needed. Manual chlorine additions are probably the best idea because the chlorine demand is likely to change dramatically from day to day, higher on weekends and very hot days I would assume.

In many places a pool like that one would be required by law to test the FC level hourly.

 

[Guest]

Again, it sounds like hiring a teenager to test it frequently seems to be the best option.

Hourly? Wow! Don't tell our City Health Department they are just down the street and would love to do that.

 

[Guest]

Ok. I found a dial from off 0 to 5 to change the setting on the injection rate of the chlorinator.

The pool showed 0 chlorine today with the strips (I know, but didn't have the TFP kit available), so I added 2 128 ounce containers of bleach to the 30,000 gallon pool. It raised it to about 10.

The CYA is way off the scale (no exact numbers on the strips) and based on the pool calculator it needs to be 8-13 FC.

I have the TFP testing kit for here on order but it won't come until next week, so looks like I will have to steal my other one from the other property to get real numbers.

Do these automatic chlorinators that use the tabs need to be cleaned? How full should you keep them? It just seems like the chlorinator is not working, since the levels are consistently at 0 everyday.

 

[JohnT]

Ok. I found a dial from off 0 to 5 to change the setting on the injection rate of the chlorinator.

The pool showed 0 chlorine today with the strips (I know, but didn't have the TFP kit available), so I added 2 128 ounce containers of bleach to the 30,000 gallon pool. It raised it to about 10.

2 gallons of bleach would only raise your chlorine by 4ppm unless it was 12% pool shock which would give you about 8ppm.

Some chlorinators have two ways to adjust the flow: The dial, and they sometimes have two ports for the hose to attach, which result in different chlorination rates.

Yes, chlorinators need to be cleaned, but I expect your pool is poorly suited to a tab chlorinator. Public or semi-public pools usually have very high chlorine consumption, which makes tabs a problem since high chlorine consumption leads to high CYA. Not only that, but the high organic load requires more frequent testing and chemical adjustment.

 

[Guest]

Ok. I found a dial from off 0 to 5 to change the setting on the injection rate of the chlorinator.

The pool showed 0 chlorine today with the strips (I know, but didn't have the TFP kit available), so I added 2 128 ounce containers of bleach to the 30,000 gallon pool. It raised it to about 10.

2 gallons of bleach would only raise your chlorine by 4ppm unless it was 12% pool shock which would give you about 8ppm.

Some chlorinators have two ways to adjust the flow: The dial, and they sometimes have two ports for the hose to attach, which result in different chlorination rates.

Yes, chlorinators need to be cleaned, but I expect your pool is poorly suited to a tab chlorinator. Public or semi-public pools usually have very high chlorine consumption, which makes tabs a problem since high chlorine consumption leads to high CYA. Not only that, but the high organic load requires more frequent testing and chemical adjustment.

Yep, found all of your comments to be true. I added 2 182 ounce bottles (2.85 gallons). I took the reading right away so it was not accurate.

This is the Pentair Rainbow 300-19 model chlorinator and has the dial. It is now cranked up to 5 (max).

I did the TFP test kit today and found CYA to be 100. The CC is 5 and the FC was 0, so need to shock it.

What about a liquid dispenser with the pump? Is that better suited? No CYA and you can crank up the injection amount of bleach.