Absorbi Acid - purchase recommendations

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dayhiker

dayhiker

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Jun 6, 2008
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Pell City, AL
Has anyone had luck buying AA from a non standard source? Amazon has it a good bit less. They are typically listing it for vitamin stores. http://www.amazon.com/NOW-Ascorbic-Acid ... =1-9-spell

I saw no listing of an anti-clumping agent. I know if you get food grade salt that has an anti-clumping agent in it that you will get yellow staining on your white surfaces in the pool.

Any thoughts or advice?

I didn't keep up with my pH over the winter and want to treat the stains before my chlorine demand comes back.
 
Thanks. I didn't want to compound my issue like I did last summer. Last summer I put walmart grade algaecide in, which had copper. I also added chlorine back too quick and the net effect was tea colored water. I'd prefer not to take 2 steps backward this time. What I want to do is get the AA in and have it absorbed and dealt with before I need to start actually producing chlorine again. Today is 70° so I suddenly need to get moving. Nights are at freezing though. I'll have that solar heater going before I know it!
 
I looked up the MSDS for this product and it appears to contain oxalic acid. This is a pretty strong organic acid, about 1000 times stronger than acetic acid (i.e.vinegar). It works similar to ascorbic acid, but it's quite a bit stronger. It also has some chelation properties that will hold the metal and keep it from re-dipositing on the pool surfaces. The idea with any of these organic acid is to act as a chemical reductant to remove oxidized iron by reducing it and putting it back into solution. The next step is to chelate or sequester the metal so it will not re-oxidize (at least immediately).

You can use oxalic acid, but it's a lot nastier than using ascorbic acid. You can buy AA pretty cheaply and do the treatment. As far as chelation is concerened, the AA will not chelate like OA will, but the recommended procedure is to add a phosphonic acid derivative like that found in Jack's Magic or similar. This will sequester the metal and keep it from re-oxidizing better than a chelater like EDTA based products.
 
Pool Stain Treat contains oxalic acid. Oxalic acid will work instead of ascorbic acid but it is somewhat more dangerous to handle, nothing too serious but definitely gloves and goggles. If you are trying to save money you might want to look at citric acid. You need to use 1.5 to 2 times as much citric acid as you would use ascorbic acid, but it is usually still much less expensive even after you buy twice as much.
 
The stuff is a good bit cheaper than AA which is what has me asking questions and being cautious about it. 2# of AA is $35-$45. A bottle of this stuff is around $13, plus it sounds like you don't have to drop the chlorine level and do all of the other stuff you ahve to do with AA.

Since it's also a sequestrant is sounds like you wouldn't need the first doze of sequestrant like you do with AA.

AA treatment for my pool (24k gallons):
2# of AA - $35-$45 - I'm a little bit light on dosage, but close enough. I have less staining this year and it worked great last year.
2 quarts of sequestrant - $50.

versus this stuff:

$13 - end of story


both options require you to put a maintenance dose of sequestrant.


This stuff seems too good to be true. WHen things seem that way, they often are that way. I'd love to pull the trigger, but don't want to be back here in a week having to get everyone to talk me through what Dave Ramsey calls the, "Stupid Tax."
 
JasonLion said:
Pool Stain Treat contains oxalic acid. Oxalic acid will work instead of ascorbic acid but it is somewhat more dangerous to handle, nothing too serious but definitely gloves and goggles. If you are trying to save money you might want to look at citric acid. You need to use 1.5 to 2 times as much citric acid as you would use ascorbic acid, but it is usually still much less expensive even after you buy twice as much.
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Thanks, I'll check that too. I had seen that as a solution but only knew it took more. I didn't know how much more.
 
dayhiker said:
plus it sounds like you don't have to drop the chlorine level and do all of the other stuff you ahve to do with AA.
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Actually, you really do to make the treatment effective. They dont tell you to drop the chlorine level, but, IMO, any treatment with a reductant will not be as effective without 1st dropping the chlorine level. A redox reation will occur. The chlorine will get reduced just like the iron and furthermore, the chlorine will get reduced before the iron so the less chlorine you have the better it will work.

dayhiker said:
Since it's also a sequestrant is sounds like you wouldn't need the first doze of sequestrant like you do with AA.
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Its not really a sequsterant, it's a chelator, and a pretty poor one at that even compared to EDTA. You really want a sequesterant like Jack's.

Yep, $100 bucks there bouts, but the method is effective. For $13 bucks, try it and see.
 
The other thing that concerned me is the writeup said it will slowly get rid of the stain.

The biggest reason I want to do this now is while the chlorine demand is 0. I uncovered my pool on Friday to try and burn off the FC 1.5 that was still in it. I've boosted my salt and alkalinity back to where they should be. My CYA is 20 right now. My thinking is treat the pool and then it 2-3 weeks start pulling the chlorine back up. By then, I'll actually need the chlorine. Last year I did this in June. I used a poor quality algaecide, pulled the chlorine up too quick and it was a mess.

This brings up another question. I imagine it's cheaper/easier to just do this each year as opposed to trying doing a weekly dose of sequestrant all winter. My pH was 7.2 when I uncovered the pool, so I felt like I was in good shape there.
 

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Also, remember that with colder water temps the treatment is going to take weeks instead of days to work. I did the AA treatment last fall and it seemed to take forever to work, but it did. :-D I started out with food grade AA from Amazon but needed more becuase it was working so slowly in cool water. I should have been a bit more patient and ordered from Amazon but purchased some from local Vit store. It was more expensive that way.

I don't know about not using sequestrate all year and then doing the AA treatment once per year. Seems to me that would give the metals more time to set in and make it harder/longer to remove the stains.

I've been using a sequestrate, Walmart brand, all winter but at lower than recommended maintenance dose because of cold water. From what I can see there is no staining in pool now. I just purchased Metal Free, for first time, from Leslie's, last week. It was about $25 for a liter ~ 33.9 oz. Maintenance does is 1 capful/10k/wk. I capful is 4 oz so the bottle should last about a month with "average " size pool. You can probably find good sequestrates at much lower prices on line but beware of product concentration and how much needed for maintenance dose.

BTW... the new guy at my Leslie's said they may be pulling the Jacks products. I think they aren't selling well enough.

gg=alice
 
I'll be using the sequestrant through the summer, was just curious about the winter. Maybe what I should have done was half the dose during winter. Does that sound in line with what you did? Thanks for the heads up on reaction time.
 
The Aquapill series is a significantly more expensive approach that gives you far less control over the process. They can have a certain connivence factor is some cases, but wouldn't even be appropriate in this situation. Their stain remover pill is designed for maintenance situations, not major stain removal.
 
dayhiker said:
I'll be using the sequestrant through the summer, was just curious about the winter. Maybe what I should have done was half the dose during winter. Does that sound in line with what you did? Thanks for the heads up on reaction time.
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I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't measure. I used up 2 of the Wally World bottles during cold months and just went out about every three weeks and pour some in. :oops:

Haven't used the pills. I'll bet someone will come along with comments.

BTW..... I probably used more sequestrate than needed during and right after AA treatment but was backwashing several times a week with my old filter. And it took more than "normal" amounts of wasted water to get my filter clean. Then we had all the rain Dec, Jan, Feb so more water let out. I kept the pH right around 7.2 all winter too. Through out the winter the calcium scale continued to slowly lift too.

gg=alice
 
I'd like to report that the citric acid did great. The stains were noticeably less within an hour. I left for the day, came back around 5pm and everything was as white as can be. I took a pH reading the next day and it was around 7.0.
 
dayhiker said:
I'd like to report that the citric acid did great. The stains were noticeably less within an hour. I left for the day, came back around 5pm and everything was as white as can be. I took a pH reading the next day and it was around 7.0.
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WOW :shock: Great news and so very fast. What is you pool water temp? And what was your estimated total costs, please. I'm sure many are wanting to know, including me. :)

gg=alice
 
My pool temp is around 55.

I bought 7# of citric so that I'd have enough on hand for another go around should the need arise this summer.
Citric acid was $22+$13 for shipping = $35
1L of Metal Free was $25. That pretty well did the trick.

I bought a 2nd bottle of the Metal Free in case I needed more and if not, so I'd have the first months maintenance dose on hand.

I put the solar blanket on then added the trampoline cover and will run the pump 3hrs per day this week with the solar panels running. I suspect by this weekend I will need to start bumping up the chlorine production. I plan to leave it on 0% until then. I'm going to check the pH daily in case the aeration from the SWG starts to make the pH creek up.
 
I know that this is an older thread but just in case anyone is doing research on copper stain removal like I am presently doing, I wanted to share a source of AA powder that surprised me. I was shopping at Trader Joe'syesterday where I usually buy some of my vitamin supplements. I noticed that they carry AA powder(the bottle says crystals but it's a fine powder) in 16oz quantity for $9.99. This is the least expensive price per pound that I have found yet...FYI :) This is not a plug for Trader Joe's and I do not work for them.... :lol:
 
I wish I had read this earlier before I just bought 5 pounds at PC NetwoRx for $65 including shipping, so $13 per pound compared to roughly $10 per pound you found. I have a Trader Joe's near my house, too. Darn!

I got the ascorbic acid due to some metal (iron) stains I'll write up about in a separate thread that apparently precipitated when the pH got to around 8.1 over the winter.
 

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