Salt Shine - Useless Product?

[drewh]

I've learnt from this great forum to be very, very skeptical of pool shops and their unnecessary products. Had a look at Bunnings (big warehouse type place in Aus that sell everything including pool chemicals).

Just a question out of interest - product called Pool Shine. It's 450g and the active ingredients are 450g/kg dichlor (so 202g in this) and 100g/kg sodium tetraborate pentahydrate (ie Borax!), so 45g of it. Claims to 'assist salt water chlorinator'. I've read in detail here about how Borates can help, but surely this tiny amount wouldn't make any difference? 45g of that according to PoolMath provides about 0.18 ppm for my size pool!

I'm sure there are suckers out there who'll buy it and many others though.

 

[pooladdict]

Yep, useless lol

Manufacturers are scrambling to find a way to make up for lost store sales due to SWG's cutting into "traditional" chemicals.

 

[JasonLion]

I never recommend using combination products. They cost more to start with, and it is extremely unlikely that you actually need both of them at the same time.

Borates are ineffective at levels below roughly 30 ppm, you need at least that much to get a noticeable effect. So tiny doses are not particularly interesting. Dichlor has the usual pros and cons, useful only very rarely because it adds CYA as well as chlorine and also lowers the PH.

 

[chem geek]

The Borax in the product helps to make it a little closer to pH neutral when accounting for chlorine usage consumption. For every 10 ppm FC with Dichlor alone, it lowers TA by 3.5 ppm after accounting for chlorine usage. With the amount of Borax in the product, the TA would drop by 2.2 ppm instead and the pH would not drop as much (or it would rise a little). They probably didn't want to add more so that the product would still seem as if it were pH neutral.

 

[drewh]

They'll try anything, I'm sure some suckers would buy it unfortunately.

Chemgeek - makes perfect sense re borax raising pH & dichlor normally lowering it, as well as the TA part. But then their claim of assists salt chlorinator is clearly false - the 0.18ppm (for my pool size) of borates wouldn't do anything would it?

So glad I'm part of this great TFP community, no fooling us

 

[JasonLion]

The most positive spin I can think of re adding borates is that it will help compensate against borates lost to splash out, assuming the borate is in the correct range to begin with. Other than that, just assume that they are there to keep the product PH neutral and ignore the borate level.