Typical measured "high" CYA levels?

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Apr 3, 2013
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San Diego, Ca
Hi,

I am tinkering with a method of removing CYA without draining. It is different than the current methods, such as RO and microbes. I am not in the pool business, but I do own a pool and have a good background in the appropriate water chemistry. I was wondering if anyone had any data available, or could point me to a source, for actual, measured CYA levels in residential pools. I live in San Diego, so I am most interested in this area, but other area data would be helpful too.k San Diego water costs are very high, so draining a pool even partially is financially hurtful. I just want to get a handle on the typical levels of CYA in pools with too much CYA. I see reports of 300 PPM once in a while, but I am more interested in typical levels of CYA where pool owners want to reduce it. Even anecdotal comments would be helpful. Also, if there are pool pros reading, I am curious as to what approximate percent of pools they believe are too high in CYA. Thank you.

Del
 
TFP suggests anything over 100 is pretty much unmangeable. I would guess the typical over-stabilized pool is between 90 and 200. Pool pros would not typically be a good resource.......many do not understand the FC/CYA relationship and not many test for the presence of CYA
 
Not sure what you intend to do with the data, whatever your CYA is you need to follow the [FC/CYA][/FC/CYA]

Would love to hear your idea. The only ways other than water exchange, bacteria, and RO that I can think of is keeping your water temperature as high as you can to speed the natural breakdown of CYA (would probably take months at 120 degrees) or raising FC levels to absolutely insane levels in an attempt to oxidize the CYA, which would be pretty ill-advised. I mean, there was an attempt in the 80's to market melamine to bind with the CYA and then you could supposedly filter it out. The fact nobody does that any more should tell you how well it worked (near impossible to filter it out and the pool just stays cloudy), melamine is also an irritant so adding gallons of it to the pool is a bad idea.

Am I close? Can't imagine any other idea that would work, but would love to hear if I'm wrong. Certainly doubt there are any that would be less financially painful than just draining the water. Being that it should be a 1-time issue for someone following TFPC (fix the old problem and then never have it again) the cost shouldn't be a major issue.

EDIT: Oh wait, is this your activated carbon idea you talked about a couple years ago?
 
Adsorption on Activated Carbon

Cyanuric acid can be removed via adsorption by pumping the pool water through a cartridge filled with granular activated carbon. However, this method is costly because the loading of the carbon is not very high and the carbon requires regeneration (by combustion) resulting in some weight loss and possibly some loss in adsorption capacity.

If we assume a 10% loading of the carbon, it would require about 150 pounds of carbon to reduce the concentration of cyanuric acid in a 20,000–gallon pool by 100 ppm.

http://www.poolhelp.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/JSPSI_V4N2_pp17-22.pdf
Click to expand...

The only other way that I know of would be melamine precipitation. But, that's been shown to have its own problems.

What is your method?
 
Re: Typical measured "high" CYA levels?

Hi Donldson,

Thanks for your thoughts. I am sorry that I never really updated the group on my further efforts on activated carbon. It did work, but even with the high prices of water in San Diego it would not be less expensive than draining and refilling some or all of the water. My new idea does work also, but it too may suffer from cost issues. At least it worked well on my pool water. The cost is almost directly related to the amount of CYA that needs to be removed. If I can convince myself that it is economically viable, I hope to patent it. Then, I can post a summary here, once filed. I am a realist, and I know that if most of the bad pools are at about 200 ppm or so, then this idea might be at a dead end. If a normal bad pool is much lower, then it may have a chance. What I do not have is any data to base my decision on, as I am not in the pool business and have not ready access to such data. As a side note, I have great respect for the folks that do whole pool RO, as it does work well, but this idea might be simpler in some circumstances. Thanks.
 
Re: Typical measured "high" CYA levels?

Intriguing. I'm not aware of any polling, but all of TFP posts dating back to its inception are archived. I'm sure with the right know-how someone could craft a bot to find instances of someone with less than 10 posts commenting on CYA. The biggest hurdle though would be filtering out questionable testing as even if you want to believe pool store testing (I wouldn't) any results by test strips should be discounted. With so much bad testing out there it is difficult to believe the numbers most people initially post, so even attempting to hash out some averages from here would have to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, it's been observed that pool stores will often just use 100 as an "out of range" answer. So it's pretty difficult to gauge what is reliable and what is not.

Regardless, I wish you luck with your idea. I'm always skeptical of new ideas in the industry (BioActive, for instance, is based on processes well documented here, but still fails to be reliable) but when someone is willing to put their own time, money, and effort in to exploring something it is commendable. I will offer one personal comment though, if you say that your idea will only be simpler than RO in some circumstances it will be difficult to market that. Even RO is limited to a few markets, outside of which it is cost prohibitive compared to water exchange. If your idea is only able to make financial sense in a fraction of the RO market then it's going to be a very niche product/service.
 
It should cost much less than RO except in the case of really high CYA levels. Of course the RO process takes out a lot more. Based on what your comments it might be interesting to try to get some actual pool water samples to test myself. I am not in the pool business so it may be hard to get a large number of samples. I have done a bit of this sort of sampling. One friend's pool was at 300 ppm and had violet stains on the plaster presumably from these levels. I tested a couple of other pools and they were just fine. I only have so many friends with pools. Thanks for the comments.
 

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Just an FYI, water costs obviously vary drastically across the country. So your markets will be limited. I think $5 / 1000 gallons is a decent average. For a 15k average pool, that is still only $75 to refill.

Personally, I can refill my pool for about $15 ... nothing is going to be cheaper than that ;)
 
Yes, it is a limited market. Look up the rates in San Diego. You will be shocked. I think it would be over $150 for that same pool. There is the convenience factor also. It is not always so easy to simply dispose of 15,000 gallons of water and then to refill. Convenience is worth something.
 
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