Antifreeze

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bkfamily1

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LifeTime Supporter
Jul 8, 2013
197
North Canton, OH
Hopefully this is an appropriate place to post this.

It has been a long time since I have been in the forum since this year has gone very well thanks to all the help from the TFP community. Thank you. It has been nice to spend the time enjoying the pool instead of trying to figure it out.

I wanted to stop in and share what I learned from last year to this year. You may remember I spent most of last summer fighting high chlorine demand. I found a few issues like algae in the niches, but nothing I did everything really got the chlorine demand to settle down. I spent around 4 months feeding 2 to 4 ppm of chlorine to the pool every day even if it was not used. I eventually just gave up and continued to feed the monster. Then magically it settled down for the last month or so of the season. I never really found a cause but had a suspicion it was antifreeze in the pool consuming the chlorine after reading some of chemgeek's posts about that. So I resolved to find a way to keep the antifreeze out of the pool when I started up this year.

My pump pad is far from the pool and has big lines due to the distance, so I use 40 to 50 gallons of RV antifreeze each year to winterize. In previous years, I just let it all go into the pool when I started up. This year I ran the water to drain when purging the suction lines. And I put stand pipes in the return line eyeball connections, connected garden hoses to them and ran them to drain when I started pumping water back toward the pool to purge them. I did not get any of the antifreeze from the lines back into the pool.

This year, I had a sparkling clear pool two days after opening and have enjoyed normal chlorine consumption and zero problems in the almost 4 months open so far.

From now on, the antifreeze is banished to the drain never to return to the pool.

Yay! Thanks again to all.
 
Wow. That thread is deja vu for me from last year. I chased all of the things that came up in that thread and had an almost identical experience - everything looking good but chewing up the chlorine day after day. Sorry I was not around to share what I had seen. I am really convinced it was the antifreeze. I will try to post a photo of what I did in the return lines to be able to purge them to drain instead of into the pool. Only future years will prove that is what it was, but it sure looks like it.
 
2-4ppm/day is normal chlorine consumption for a pool that gets roughly 8-10 hours of summer sun each day. Some pools can be on the lower end and get 1ppm/day loss but that's a pool that gets lots of shade or has high CYA levels.

Dumping 50 gallons of antifreeze into a pool is definitely not a good thing as most of the chlorine oxidation byproducts are nasty trihalomethane (THMs) compounds like chloroform. At high concentrations they can make people feel sick but don't generally show up on the CC test. Did you ever notice any issues with bather comfort? Did your pool smell bad at opening?

Thanks for the post as it serves as a good warning to those that winterize to consider ways to mitigate antifreeze exposure.
 
Joyful Noise

I have a fully opaque auto cover on my pool, and when things are right like this year, I only lose 1 or 1.5 ppm per day if the pool is not used. You are right that I will see 2 to 4 when it is open, but I was seeing that when it was closed up tight.

Nobody ever complained about discomfort. But you could catch an unusual odor when the cover was opened, although it would go away soon.

I still have not gotten out to get a picture of how I was able to flush the return lines out of the pool, but will do so as soon as I can.

Swamp Woman

It is good to be back, but it is even better not to have to spend a bunch of time in the forum trying to figure out problems [emoji3]
 
bkfamily1 said:
Joyful Noise

I have a fully opaque auto cover on my pool, and when things are right like this year, I only lose 1 or 1.5 ppm per day if the pool is not used. You are right that I will see 2 to 4 when it is open, but I was seeing that when it was closed up tight.

Nobody ever complained about discomfort. But you could catch an unusual odor when the cover was opened, although it would go away soon.

I still have not gotten out to get a picture of how I was able to flush the return lines out of the pool, but will do so as soon as I can.

Swamp Woman

It is good to be back, but it is even better not to have to spend a bunch of time in the forum trying to figure out problems [emoji3]
Click to expand...

How often are you opening it? If you are experiencing odors upon opening then chloramines are building up under the cover. If you have the option to automate it, I would schedule the cover to open up once per day at highest possible sun for about 30mins to an hours. The chlorine loss shouldn't appreciably increase but you'll let the UV from the sun help.

UV also helps to breakdown THMs and so when you dumped all that antifreeze into the water, leaving the pool cover closed just kept the reaction rates between UV, FC and antifreeze low. Most THMs are volatile enough that, with sufficient UV exposure, they would breakdown further and offgas from the water.

Safety covers are a fine idea but outdoor pools benefit a lot from UV exposure so it's a good idea to open the pool up even when it's not being used.
 
Joyful Noise, I am not experiencing any odors this year. That was only happening last year when things were out of whack. And yes, opening it regularly did help eliminate the odor. Thanks for the suggestion to open the pool regularly when not in use.
 

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That was any thread from this year. Thanks for your response. My question remains: if antifreeze is the cause of this dramatic increase in consumption for myself and bkfamily, why isn't this more broadly known and experienced? Is it a specific kind of antifreeze? A certain volume?
 
Is it a specific kind of antifreeze? A certain volume?
Click to expand...

Joinnj, TFP is unique in that many pool owners collaborate and have the means to actually measure what's going on in their water. As such, we seem to stumble upon phenomenon such as this that eludes general "knowledge" in the retail pool industry. On one hand, a certain amount of empirical evidence builds up. On the other, since our conclusions are remote and can't be recreated as experiments, its not "hard data" in this case.

So its impossible under these circumstances to quantify how much antifreeze seems to create this high cc/consumption issue, or to know all the variables involved, which include pool size in terms of gallons.

AND many people DO let antifreeze back in the pool without reporting problems.

After the threads I'd witnessed, my informal advice is simply to bleed off/drain lines to waste on opening for a few minutes.
 
I think it has something, or a lot, to do with volumes. I think when most folks use antifreeze they are using a couple of gallons at most. I try to get antifreeze in the low points of the piping where water may collect. 40-50 gallons is a whole different animal and I think is very atypical.

Historically, I add maybe two gallons of antifreeze and do try to flush it from the piping out of the pool during spring startup. I basically just place my vacuum hose over each return then pull the plug to direct the water out as the system primes in the spring.

Certainly an excellent write up and good documentation of the potential...thanks for sharing!
 
Is any amount of anti-freeze safe to use? I take care of all my pool needs including the opening, the only thing I don't do is the closing because I live in the north east and we get cold winters so I want to make sure the lines are blown properly. I don't trust myself and don't want to risk frozen pipes.

I know the company I use to close my pool uses some anti-freeze. is this normal? I don''t know how much they use. When I open the pool, I don't do anything special to prevent anti-freeze from getting into the pool. I also never have any issues with chlorine levels after I open and balance the pool.

Should I be concerned?
 
Its considered quite normal for a pool company to use antifreeze on closing...they prefer the extra insurance. The type they use is considered safe for humans and is biodegrade-able. DIYers should ONLY ever use the RV/Pool type, NEVER the automotive type, which IS toxic.

If you typically don't have problems on opening, keep doing what you're doing ;)

Alternately, it doesn't hurt to turn the system to waste for a few minutes to clear it out so that you will use less FC since there won't be as much antifreeze for it to break down ;)
 
Swampwoman said:
Its considered quite normal for a pool company to use antifreeze on closing...they prefer the extra insurance. The type they use is considered safe for humans and is biodegrade-able. DIYers should ONLY ever use the RV/Pool type, NEVER the automotive type, which IS toxic.

If you typically don't have problems on opening, keep doing what you're doing ;)

Alternately, it doesn't hurt to turn the system to waste for a few minutes to clear it out so that you will use less FC since there won't be as much antifreeze for it to break down ;)
Click to expand...

Thanks !
 
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