Ack, major scale on my salt cell

[Brett S]

So I have an small Intex pool with the Intex SWCG. Life has been good and trouble free for most of the summer, then my son wound up in the hospital again for a short time and the pool was completely neglected for a bit and it has become green:



I got some liquid chlorine and I emptied the skimmer basket and brushed the sides and began to SLAM the pool this morning, but as I was checking the filter I noticed that the salt cell seems to have a great deal of scale, I’m thinking that this had a significant effect on chlorine output and was likely what started my problem:



My pH was also very high... well above 8, which is as high as the Taylor test kit reads, but based on the amount of acid it took to bring it back down I believe it was around 8.4. (I measured pH before I started the SLAM, so high chlorine didn’t affect it)

After adding the acid to bring down the pH and before adding the Chlorine for the slam here are my numbers:

FC 0.6
CC 0.0
pH 7.2
TA 100
CH 140
CYA 70
Salt 3200

That said, how do I remove the scale? Can I just soak it in muriatic acid for a bit? And what can I do to keep this from happening in the future? Other than the high pH (which I’m not sure would cause this scale) I don’t think there’s a problem with my numbers.

Thanks much

 

[mknauss]

Check the Intex manual. Normally you soak in a 3 parts water / 1 part MA solution. But not sure on Intex.

The high pH and elevated TA caused the scaling. How did the pH get that high? It is hard for water to naturally get that high, normally a chemical must be added to raise it that much.

 

[Brett S]

Thanks for the reply. I’m not sure how the pH had gotten that high, actually. Nothing has been added to the pool but rainwater for more than a month. Unfortunately, like I said, I had neglected the pool for a bit, so I hadn’t done any testing recently, but typically my pH would stay around 7.4. I was pretty surprised to see it that high. I’ll definitely be sure to keep the pH and TA down in the future

 

[Newdude]

The pool can be fixed and the wonderful people here will help you with that. How's your son ?