Rising TA

[NYUnderground]

Morning All,

Question for you all. Been dialing in my pump runtime and SWG percentage and had some small green algae spots a few days ago. Have been shocking since Friday and have passed overnight loss test with no CC this morning and water looks great. Tested TA this morning and it's risen to 110 and PH from Friday(before I started shocking) was 7.2. TA was 80 last week. I have a vinyl liner pool and was wondering if I should do anything to lower TA at this point or just wait until FC drops to below shock level And then retest PH and go from there. Thoughts?

 

[BadOleRoss]

I would wait until the FC drops and then retest. If the TA is still high you can lower it with muriatic acid and then raise your PH back up with aeration.

 

[NYUnderground]

Sounds like a plan. Thx so much for the quick response.

 

[NYUnderground]

Need a little more guidance. FC is dropping and is currently at 10 and I've tuned down the SWG a little more to drop into my sweet spot. TA is still at 110 but my PH is perfect at 7.2. My question is how important is it to get TA down to 70? According to Pool Calculator adding 64 oz of 20 baum acid would only lower TA by 10? I would need to add 250 oz of acid to get the TA down to 70. Obviously I cant do that in one shot or my PH would plummet to under 5. Should I just keep adding small amounts of acid to lower TA and then aerate to get PH back to 7.2 after each addition?

 

[JasonLion]

The main reason to lower the TA is to stop the PH from constantly rising. If the PH is only going up very slowly, you can take it slow and only lower the PH down to 7.2 when it gets up to 7.8. If you are in a hurry you can lower the PH back down to 7.2 as often as you want and also add some extra aeration to speed up the PH rise so you can add more acid sooner. There is slightly more detail in the Pool School article on how to lower TA.

 

[NYUnderground]

Sounds good Jason and TY. Will keep close tabs on PH and lower TA slowly by acid addition. As long as I'm not seeing large PH swings then I will take my time to lower TA.