Purchased a new home w/ a pool in Nov and it's been my first pool experience.
We've been using the pool person that the previous owner had used but in the mean time I've learning to take care of the pool on my own and have become fairly good at it.
Located in SoCal. The pool is about 23K in ground/outdoor pebbletech (4' Shallow End, 8' Deep End). Pool has a chlorine puck feeder and have been using about 1 x 3" puck per week. DE Filter and Floor Cleaner. Pool has a waterfall from the hot tub to the pool. Been able to keep pool at 1.5-3ppm chlorine. Been using Phos Free with Pool Perfect. Experimented with shock, muratic acid, PH UP and Alk Up. I now will only use Baking Soda and Boax for those needs.
I use an AquaChek Truetest for daily testing and a Taylor K-2006 for weekly and have been going to the pool store monthly to backup the my readings and have been near spot on the last two trips.
Water looks perfect. I tried using Chlorine yesterday for the first time and my PH jumped up over 8 so used some muriatic acid to get it back down. I'm now second guessing the bleach route.
Recent test yesterday produced:
FC- 3.6
PH-7.6
TA-101
CYA 60
My initial thoughts from this is it worth the trouble? Please tell me why I'm wrong?
The pool has been perfect with just the pucks and phosfree. I know my chlorine usage will go up in summer. Adding bleach seems like a hassle since I need to lug and store it and manually dose the pool daily. It also seems to needs muriatic acid to keep PH in check.
Since my pool has a DE filter that goes to the sewer, I figure when I backwash the filter I can just drain the pool down 1/4 or so to compensate for the increased CYA buildup. A 50lb bucket of Trichlor sells for about $100 and best guess is that it will easily last for a more than a year. 50lbs of Trichlor will raise the CYA 166. My water costs about $4 per 748 gallons. So even changing 1/4 of the pool 3 times a year will be only $90-100 in total water cost. That's only $200 a year for water and Trichlor, and super ease of use. Just add the pucks to the feeder and add the hose to the pool when back washing.
If I were to go the bleach route and if my calculations are correct I'd need to buy roughly 90 gallons of 6% bleach to get the same amount of chlorine that the 50lbs of Trichlor offers. 90 gallons of bleach at Costco is roughly $190-210. Then there is the muratic acid which needs to be factored in. I still need to back wash the filter so no less work there.
Even if the cost were the same or even less with bleach, I'm doing a lot more manual work with bleach and more trips to the store and more storage needed.
Am I wrong in my thinking here?
We've been using the pool person that the previous owner had used but in the mean time I've learning to take care of the pool on my own and have become fairly good at it.
Located in SoCal. The pool is about 23K in ground/outdoor pebbletech (4' Shallow End, 8' Deep End). Pool has a chlorine puck feeder and have been using about 1 x 3" puck per week. DE Filter and Floor Cleaner. Pool has a waterfall from the hot tub to the pool. Been able to keep pool at 1.5-3ppm chlorine. Been using Phos Free with Pool Perfect. Experimented with shock, muratic acid, PH UP and Alk Up. I now will only use Baking Soda and Boax for those needs.
I use an AquaChek Truetest for daily testing and a Taylor K-2006 for weekly and have been going to the pool store monthly to backup the my readings and have been near spot on the last two trips.
Water looks perfect. I tried using Chlorine yesterday for the first time and my PH jumped up over 8 so used some muriatic acid to get it back down. I'm now second guessing the bleach route.
Recent test yesterday produced:
FC- 3.6
PH-7.6
TA-101
CYA 60
My initial thoughts from this is it worth the trouble? Please tell me why I'm wrong?
The pool has been perfect with just the pucks and phosfree. I know my chlorine usage will go up in summer. Adding bleach seems like a hassle since I need to lug and store it and manually dose the pool daily. It also seems to needs muriatic acid to keep PH in check.
Since my pool has a DE filter that goes to the sewer, I figure when I backwash the filter I can just drain the pool down 1/4 or so to compensate for the increased CYA buildup. A 50lb bucket of Trichlor sells for about $100 and best guess is that it will easily last for a more than a year. 50lbs of Trichlor will raise the CYA 166. My water costs about $4 per 748 gallons. So even changing 1/4 of the pool 3 times a year will be only $90-100 in total water cost. That's only $200 a year for water and Trichlor, and super ease of use. Just add the pucks to the feeder and add the hose to the pool when back washing.
If I were to go the bleach route and if my calculations are correct I'd need to buy roughly 90 gallons of 6% bleach to get the same amount of chlorine that the 50lbs of Trichlor offers. 90 gallons of bleach at Costco is roughly $190-210. Then there is the muratic acid which needs to be factored in. I still need to back wash the filter so no less work there.
Even if the cost were the same or even less with bleach, I'm doing a lot more manual work with bleach and more trips to the store and more storage needed.
Am I wrong in my thinking here?