Split from Green, Green, Go Away!

[cborn]

Hi
I want to just thank all of you, and the person who recommended going to Leslie Pools for water testing. I am in Northern Virginia and had a 6000 gallon fiberglass pool installed last year. The pool company that did install is local and has the worst customer service imaginable for $50,000. They caused many problems. Three weeks ago, my water suddenly became cloudy and green after rain. Testing showed very very low PH and Alkalinity. After repeated trips to these local losers, who by the way never tested for water hardness or metal, they told me to find another pool company to work with. Yes, I was angry they would not and could not fix the water problem, Leslie Pool tested for these two and found the calcium hardness was 100, should be about 350 for this pool. It cleared up overnight. Yes, low levels of ph, alkanity and hardness can cause greenness.

I also found that low PH and Alkalinity can cause acidic water which is bad for your pool and equipment.

If anyone in Northern Virginia is thinking of having a pool installed, contact me and I WILL tell you the name of this company to avoid.

Chris

 

[chem geek]

Glad your pool problems were solved. Low pH means acidity -- it's the same thing. A low TA means that the pH can change more rapidly and the combination of low pH and low TA and low CH are very corrosive to plaster surfaces, essentially dissolving them (though it takes some time). There has been talk about needing at least some calcium carbonate saturation to protect the gel coat in fiberglass pools, but we never ran into an actual situation such as yours before (at least I can't remember one). It's interesting that the pool turned green from this condition. That must be something unique with fiberglass as normally there are only two conditions that turn a pool green -- copper or algae. The low pH in the pool could corrode copper in a gas heater's heat exchanger, but that would not magically clear up when raising the pH, TA and CH.

You didn't add anything else to the pool to clear it up, right? No metal sequestrant or anything like that? You only added pH Up, maybe Alkalinity Up and Calcium Chloride? Did you add any chlorine?

You can get yourself a good test kit, the TF100 from tftestkits.com here as that will test everything you need accurately.

Richard

 

[cborn]

Hi

I only added ph up, then down because they raised it too high, soda ash, and the hardness plus. We are on a well but didn't fill the pool with well water. thank you very much. I will ask about the calcium carbonite. That was never mentioned to me before.

Chris

 

[chem geek]

You don't need to ask about calcium carbonate. With low pH, TA and CH the pool was way under-saturated and the amount of calcium carbonate is calculated from these parameters (and CYA, TDS and temp). I just didn't know it could cause green in a fiberglass pool. As I said we (I believe waterbear was the first to pointed this out) thought that some calcium carbonate saturation was needed for fiberglass pools, but didn't know how much. Of course, with low pH which is acidic conditions, that's just plain bad for everything, be it fiberglass or metals.

 

[mbar]

I never heard of that either. I have a fiberglass pool, and never had it turn green with low calcium and alkalinity. Which it has been for short periods of time after a stain treatment at the beginning of the season. I do use calcium in my pool - I keep it around 200, and run my pool with alkalinity at around 80 and ph at about 7.2-7.4. I keep the chlorine at the level comparable to my cya.