Treefiter, did you happen to catch this thread:
Just got Taylor-2006 Test Kit. Want to verify what I should add.
Check out the pictures in 8 and 9.
I haven't seen this one specifically, but I have seen a few posts regarding home made iron traps. Very clever, but I think with these filters, only the oxidized (insoluble) iron is being picked up. Sometimes this gets most of it, since we add strong oxidizers like chlorine to the water, but the situation I'm dealing with is a bit different.
Its really kind of interesting. The pool was a nightmare, and nobody could figure out how to clear it up. Finally it landed in my lap, and I got it straightened out. Strange things were happening in this pool. The pool guy before me knew the pool had a history of iron problems, so he tried to "fix" them with a sequestrant. The sequestrant caused all of the calcium to precipitate, and cloud the water. So I approached the cloudy water as an algae issue, and it didn't seem to get much better until I blind vacuumed the pool and saw that in the middle of this pool was a pile of white (saw it coming out the waste line). We stopped using the sequestrant, and a few days later, the pool started to clear up. Then we saw that the entire liner was orange. So we hit it again with the sequestrant, which did lift the iron stains, but it turned the water cloudy again due to the calcium precipitate. This was how we figured out that it was the sequestrant causing the cloudiness. At that point I started looking for other ways to deal with iron. We never had the typical greenish or rusty looking water. We barely had a rusty backwash. The iron just kept coming back on the liner.
I found out about the CuLater, and decided to try that along with a citric acid treatment. Citric acid treatment would lift the stains, but even with the CuLater, they keep coming back. I have seen the CuLater work in other pools, but for some reason, this pool just doesn't want to cooperate. The other really strange thing about this pool is that we have never been able to get a positive result for iron when tested. The only explanation I have found for this is that the iron I am seeing is within Iron Bacteria. The bacteria is staying on the liner, and isn't really in the water, so it doesn't show up in any tests. I'm not sure I'm convinced of this, but I'm currently trying a different approach that was reccomended by the people at CuLater to kill the Iron Bacteria and free up the iron so the CuLater can remove it. There is a post on TFP somewhere discussing the same issue. It sounds like they were successful in that case.
Anyway, this long and painful journey with this one pool has brought about numerous conversations and brainstorming sessions about how to get iron out of a pool. The most recent one took us down the path to Deionizing Resins. I don't think it will fix the problems I've had with this particular pool, but it would be nice to find a few options that might work for normal iron situations.