I just completed my conversion from Baquacil to a Aquatrol SWG. :-D
It took a little time but man is it going to well worth it. :lol:
Baquacil worked fine the first 3 yrs we had our pool, after that every year we would get this lovely pinkish crud growing inour pool that cost lots MORE money to get rid of (if it got rid of it at all). Finally got tired of fighting the resistant crud in our pool and decide to make the switch this spring when we opened the pool.
We went with the SWG mainly due to the fact that our neighbors use one on there in ground pool and never had the problems that we have had over the past 4 years with Baquacil.
I can definately tell you this: Your pool water will change a lovely color of green until all of that old Baquacil junk is gone from your water!!
Yes, everything I read says not to turn on the SWG until you have your water balanced and the Baquacil is gone.
I used lots and lots of non-chlorine shock from my pool store to get rid of the baquacil but i also read where you can just use bleach to accomplish this too.
Luckily for me all of my other numbers were looking good once i got rid of the Baquacil so i simply added 8lbs of CYA, 2 lbs of Chlorine turbo shock, about 360 lbs of water softener salt crystals( you have to make sure they are 99% pure or higher), and turned on my SWG.
Now I'll wait a couple of days to test the water and see where all my numbers are at after the SWG has a chance to run.
p.s. the water already looks better than last year!!
sorry I also forgot to mention that we changed the sand in our filter once our Baqucil reading was 0.