Borates - need opinions

[lucasaltic]

Anyone have any opinions on what this borate reading is? I’m getting “NFI” lol…

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Usually the test strips have to be read very quickly after dipping. And if your FC is high, the color can bleach out. I’d say it’s something above 50ppm but I haven’t used borate test strips in a long time.

 

[JamesW]

Have you added any borates?

What value do you think you should have?

 

[lucasaltic]

Usually the test strips have to be read very quickly after dipping. And if your FC is high, the color can bleach out. I’d say it’s something above 50ppm but I haven’t used borate test strips in a long time.

The instructions say wait 30 seconds with strip held parallel facing up so that’s what I did. It was actually even more yellow at the 30 second mark.

 

[lucasaltic]

Have you added any borates?

What value do you think you should have?

Well not 100% certain. Back in June or so, I added 25 lb of boric acid to the 10,000 gal pool according to pool math. That would have given me around 50 ppm. For weeks afterwards it would read around 75 by the strips. But my salt levels were declining due to leaks and such (most of that saga is documented in various posts here), however my borate number never came down with the salt like I thought it should. I never added any more borates. I sort of just stopped testing borates after that. Recently I just tested again and this is what I got. So it could be anywhere between 0 and 100 lol. Maybe the strips are just bad?

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Well not 100% certain. Back in June or so, I added 25 lb of boric acid to the 10,000 gal pool according to pool math. That would have given me around 50 ppm. For weeks afterwards it would read around 75 by the strips. But my salt levels were declining due to leaks and such (most of that saga is documented in various posts here), however my borate number never came down with the salt like I thought it should. I never added any more borates. I sort of just stopped testing borates after that. Recently I just tested again and this is what I got. So it could be anywhere between 0 and 100 lol. Maybe the strips are just bad?

Strips can definitely go bad if they were exposed to outdoor environment. The borate strips are notoriously hard to get a good reading from.

Also, if you had a leak, then you can safely assume that the borate level dropped by the same percentage as your salt level. So if you lost 25% of your salt level, then your borates went down by the same amount.