Bromine be gone!

[X-PertPool]

I have a customer who's pool has been jacked up by the pool store they sold them gallons of no mor problems and bromine tabs. I'm trying to get them back on the right trac k by adding Cal hypo daily (low hardness in this area). done this before in the past on another pool and it took most of the season for the bromine to leave the pool. Ate there any other options other than draining to expedite this process?

 

[JasonLion]

Drain or wait (usually for years) are your only two options. You can use chlorine to reactivate the bromine that is already in the water.

 

[chem geek]

And apparently pools that have used bromine tabs take longer to get rid of the bromine, probably because of the DMH in the tabs that acts a bit like CYA in chlorine tabs so lowers active bromine level making it slower to outgas. Unfortunately, we don't know the bromine/DMH relationship but I suspect it's not as strong as the chlorine/CYA one (i.e. DMH doesn't bond as strongly to bromine).

 

[X-PertPool]

I was expecting those answers

I guess I'll have to tell the customer that her best bet is to drain. The pool water starts to get a tint of green to it (only noticeable in the hopper) on a daily basis. The green will go away if she adds cal-hypo. Right now she is adding 64 oz throughout a day. She has a chlorinator and tabs but the CYA was near perfect (towards the higher end of the scale) So I don't want her to abuse the chlorinator and have to end up draining anyways because of the CYA getting too high. The people that put her pool in are the same that did this to her. Besides the pH being slightly low her pool was really balanced. She probably just needed more chlorine when she went in for a problem. They told her she was keeping her pool too warm for chlorine (90 degreees) so that's why the bromine tabs came into play. They also sold her a few gallons of no mor problems and phosphate remover. Sadly I feel the bromine tabs are what has really done it for this pool because of the DMH.

I was hoping for some crazy idea like reverse osmosis (I don't think we have that here). Or something that would get rid of the bromine like converting to baquacil temporarily or letting the whole pool turn into a swamp, or gamma radiation ( oh wait it's already turning green on it's own)


In the event of a draining how much needs to be drained out to effectively clear out the bromine? Most of the water? Bone dry? (vinyl liner pool, naturally keep a vac running behind the liner)

 

[chem geek]

Unfortunately to remove bromine nearly all the water needs to be replaced. It might be better to just live with it and do partial drain/refill and rain overflow dilution over time.

 

[crokett]

Since you are in PA and the pool will be winterized, what about a partial drain/refill now, then when you winterize take more water out than normal and refill again at opening? Or is that just making the pain last longer?

 

[X-PertPool]

It's up to the customer to decide, basically I think the best choices are a complete drain and fill or leaving 6 inches in the shallow end that way she doesn't have to use a vacuum behind the liner.