What do you think about this? Aquazerve

[Buggsw]

I was surfing the net on pool info and came across this. I've never heard of such a thing before and have no personal opinion about it other than it's clever. I wonder what you all think about it. We definately do have a high fill water TDS in Arizona.

http://www.aquazerve.com/index.html

 

[JasonLion]

TDS is not really an issue. Worries about TDS date back to when people didn't understand how CYA worked. When the CYA got too high they blamed it on TDS. Using bleach it is simple enough to keep your CYA level reasonable and never need to drain your pool. If you have a cartridge filter you won't even need to backwash.

 

[duraleigh]

I gave the site a cursory glance and it appears that they are simply saying don't waste the water that you take out of the pool to control TDS....that makes sense but why not just put a little submersible pump into the pool and redirect the water onto your plants....either through a garden hose or a more sophisticated system of distribution pipes/hoses? Heck, if you have any plants lower than the water level in the pool, you could just siphon it off.

That said, I agree with Jason that TDS is rarely an issue but, in an arid climate, over time, there may be a need to control it. I have never seen anything definitive on what level of TDS is too much. Anybody got any ideas?

 

[Buggsw]

Out here in Arizona TDS and Calcium Hardness levels easily get very high. Terribly hard water and very high evaporation rate. 100" or more per year evap loss which is about 1/3" daily rate average water lost.

I've seen literature that some say over 1500 TDS is too high, others say over 2500 TDS is when it's too high.

Yes, a submersible pump could do it, so could directing your backwash to your plants - but that would be a manual process - The neat thing about this is hooking it right into your pool plumbing and to a drip system which many of us use on our landscapes only from fresh water daily to keep plants regularly watered.

What I'm not sure of is whether it would really be enough to compensate for the evap loss and fill water TDS and hardness combined.

I still think it may be a better solution to watering your plants instead of hooking your drip system into fresh fill water. Now, that's clever.

 

[JasonLion]

People with a SWG typically run with TDS around 3500, or higher. People with true salt water pools (ocean water) can have TDS around 33,000. TDS is almost never the issue. The issue is levels of particular things, such as CH. Some of the things you do want to worry about are difficult to test for, so some people use TDS as a proxy for how close they are getting to a point where they know that they will have a problem. But any such calibration is very dependent on local conditions.