This is an amazing conversation and great timing. I wasn't sure if it's more appropriate to piggy-back here or start a new thread. My assumption was that it could hopefully be more beneficial here since we are in a similar situation.
I have been planning to empty my pool Tuesday as I am also having a hard time with high CH (1175) and salt cell has been clogging up with CH within a day and have found myself adding acid up to 3 xs/day to keep it low, trying to get it down to 7.2 and shooting back up to 8.2 within the same day (although I'm still not convinced it actually gets down to 7.2 even though I believe I am using the math calculator correctly and and correct in the gallons in my rectangular pool). I learn something each time I'm on this website but I also forget and am now being reminded to not try to bring pH down to 7.2 but make it more of a gradual process. I've been running my one form of aeration (a bubbler on the baja step) constantly as I have been trying to move this process faster, thinking that would help. TA moved from 130-90 after my winter slacking so I thought I was on our way to having levels balanced, but CH seems to be building up faster in salt cell and now it's seeming like a losing battle.
Now that I am reading about the water softener I am wondering if I should not empty the pool Tues and hurry and get a water softener first since we were just talking about a water softener last night. My husband has wanted one for years saying it's better for appliances and now that it's mentioned here, my son does have very dry skin. I was told it's a waist of water. Does anyone know the amount of water a water softener waists for every gallon used? I'm thinking, for my scenario, I'd have to empty my pool every 3 years without a water softener so I would compare water being wasted to that. Also, we do not have a clean out and it's seeming like a hassle to get a permit from Phx to empty pool. Now that we decided we feel we need to empty it last minute and the city never called me back we'd have to consider emptying it illegally overnight which I do not want to go through every 3 yrs so we'd probably look at putting in a clean-out and that would be an extra expense as well.
I'd like to learn more about borates how that protects a salt cell so will have to do more reading, but with a water softener would that be necessary? I think I'm still trying to figure out the relation between CH and pH and my thought has been that if I can keep CSI closer to zero or in the negatives by a TH of 60 or so and a lower pH then all would be fine. It does seem that once CH is about 1500 or so, though, best solution is to empty the pool from what I'm hearing.
Anyone know of a good place that can install a water softener in Phx ASAP? I heard they r easy to install so maybe we could attempt it ourselves?
thx!