Faster Dissolving Cyanuric Acid

[Guest]

If you are going to need to backwash then bite the bullet and realize that you ARE going to lose some CYA, if from nothing else but the water removed and replaced during backwashing. A sock MIGHT help but I believe that Jason is right and much of the CYA that leaves the sock ends up in the filter anyway since it will take a week for it really all to dissolve. At least the CYA in the sock is still in the pool but bottom line is that you will most likely need to add moer CYA anyway after testing the water once it's all dissovled since you will lose some of it.

Once again, THIS is a special case and is NOT the recommended way to add CYA if you are only trying to increase the level. THAT is what I would like to see stressed!!!!!!

 

[rock]

I was told that Hasa makes a Cyanuric Acid that is a baby fine powder so dissolves in a bucket reasonably well ....Has anyone tried this? Does it dissolve more quickly?

Hi Richard,
I can answer your questions, as I have personally used the powder to easily bring a 40K gallon pool and a 30K gallon pool up from 0 PPM CYA to about 50PPM in a single sitting (and, I'm doing another friend's pool in a few weeks, when he's finished with some work he's doing on it).

The CYA powder, for me, was very easy to obtain here in the Silicon Valley. HASA sells it in large buckets to my local pool store who will then sell it to us at the exact same price as they sell the granular CYA, and in any desired amount. They just scoop the powder into a container, at one half pound per scoop, for as many scoops as you like.

To further answer your question, now that I have some experience, using the technique I documented in its own thread, I can easily get four or five 8-ounce cups of the powder to disperse in a single 5-gallon bucket of pool water, as long as I swish that water with my hand as I'm applying it, which can then easily be poured into the pool as a suspended "milk" solution, which, further disperses beautifully into the pool (see detailed pictures in the aforementioned thread).

As you well know from your other threads on this subject, distributing CYA particles completely surrounded by water allows for maximum dissolving in the pool, leaving absolutly no residue in my two recent tests.

In summary, it was so very easy for me to obtain the powder here in California (HASA told me that any pool store that buys from HASA has access to the powder), and, it was certainly far faster to bring a pool up from 0ppm to 50ppm than it ever was with the granules, at the same costs as the granules. You can see my detailed thread (with many pictures) on the subject for more application details.

 

[chem geek]

Details are in the thread How best to quickly distribute 12lbs of cyanuric acid POWDER in a self-cleaning pool?, but anyone reading this thread should note that this is not currently a recommended form of CYA to use. Note that this powder does not seem to be at most pool stores though any selling Hasa chemicals should be able to get it. The main key to using it is to pour it into a bucket of water that is swirling, keep it swirling, and then disperse it into the pool. The swirling is critical to prevent it clumping/caking in the bucket. Once in the pool, it dissolves more quickly than regular CYA due to it being a powder. Note that this is NOT a substitute to be put into a sock -- only the granular CYA should be used that way (it makes no sense to use the powder in any way except keeping it in suspension by swirling).