Hth salt poolcare 3-in-1 and then muriatic acid?

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Jen29K

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May 31, 2013
7
Hi everyone. I haven't figured out the signature thing yet so I'll first give you my pool specs:
Intex 16 x 48 round ultra frame pool with SWG.
It's leveled, clear, beautiful, and horribly unbalanced.

We filled it a few days ago, added 120 lbs of salt, and ran the filter alone for 24 hours. Then we tested--
Yesterday, 4pm, after an unfortunate heavy rain.

Salt test strip:
Salt was fine: the pump had no warning indicators and a strip test confirmed that salt was in the optimum range (around 3000 for our pool.)

Aqua chem 6-way test strip:
Hardness was very bad: over 1000 ppm, which supposedly doesn't matter for vinyl pool.

Total chlorine was very bad: at 0

Free chlorine was very bad, at 0

Ph was very bad, a brighter pink than 8.4 on the tester chart.

TA was very bad, a blue color past the 180 on the chart.

Stabilizer was bad, at 0.

I added 1.5 lbs of ph down and a pound of hth 3-in-1 startup for salt pools. According to what I've read, ph down will help ph and alkalinity. The other stuff should help stabilize and contains Cyanuric acid which should help prevent the sun killing the chlorine. Then we ran swg for 6 hours and retested. Ph was slightly lower but otherwise no change. We then added nothing and ran the swg all night.

This morning, 9am, after all night rain tested again.
Free chlorine was a little better, in the ok range, but ph was somewhere between 7.8 and not ok.
Everything else was still bad.

I added a half pound of 3-in-1 and 1.5 lbs ph down and ran the SWG until now.
3pm test
Hardness seems to have come down a little but I'm not certain.
Total chlorine appears to be between zero and 1 (still closer to white but I can tell it has changed)
Ph is closer to 7.2 than 7.8 (yay!)
TA is less blue but still not quite on the chart
Stabilizer is still around 0.
I added about a half lb of ph down.

Now for the real question: we would like to go in the pool 24 hours from now. If TA and stabilizer haven't remedied at some point, can I add muriatic acid (to help the TA) and cyuranic acid to stabilize? They're chemicals so i don't know if I can put them in on to of the chems I've already put in. Also, if someone has other advice I'd love it.

Thanks!!!
 
HTH® Salt Pool Care 3-in-1 is a fairly inefficient way to add CYA. It contains sequestrant, clarifier, and CYA. Of the three you only need CYA right now, so at best the rest of it is wasted, and might conceivably cause problems.

With very low CYA levels, you are going to lose most (all?) of your chlorine to sunlight each sunny day. Until you raise the CYA level significantly you won't be able to maintain an FC level. For a SWG we recommend CYA be between 70 and 80. However you should approach that level in a couple of steps, since it is easy to add more, but difficult to lower CYA if you overshoot.

The hardness isn't going to come down on it's own. The only way to lower hardness is to replace water. However, the test strips are fairly unreliable, so your hardness might not actually be all that bad. You should test your fill water and see what it's hardness level is.

Having hardness very very low is fine in a vinyl liner pool. But having hardness very high is a problem in any kind of pool.

The best thing you could possibly do is to get a top quality test kit. Without reliable information to go on, you are just guessing about what is going on and what needs to be done.
 
Okay, I got the best kit I could find and painstakingly followed instructions.
Total chlorine- 2.5
TA- 270
Ph-7.2
Hardness- 320
CYA- pretty much non existant

Now what? It doesn't make sense that my alkalinity is so high when the ph is okay.
 
Jen29K said:
Okay, I got the best kit I could find and painstakingly followed instructions.
Total chlorine- 2.5
TA- 270
Ph-7.2
Hardness- 320
CYA- pretty much non existant

Now what? It doesn't make sense that my alkalinity is so high when the pH is okay.
Click to expand...
Sure it does. The pH will climb fairly quickly, and when you lower it with acid, you'll also lower pH.

It might take a few days for the CYA to register; it does with plain CYA. Your SWG seems to be doing okay keeping the FC up, so stop stressing and go swimming. Note: target FC for SWG pool with zero CYA is 1 to3; up to 20 CYA is 1 to 5. You're fine.

As long as the pool doesn't turn green, everything else is relatively easy to fix, and TA is not critical by any means.
 
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