Enzyme Water Cleaner

[jackrogue]

. . . many of us have NEVER changed our sand and have no intention to do so . . . a properly operating sand filter can (and usually does) leave your pool crystal clear. Sand is a perfectly acceptable filter medium which sort of explains why it has been around so long . . . the solution is frequently found in proper water chemistry or, less likely, some type of mechanical damage to the filter. Less often, the pump and filter are simply not being operated long enough to keep the water clear . . .

I defer to your professional expertise, and I will heed your advice regarding my 24-year-old sand filter. I recently had an extensive whitefly infestation, and I surmise that the honeydew film and insect eggs that ended up in my pool have caused my current persistent cloudy water condition. I'm SLAMing, brushing and flushing my sand filter daily. My water chemistry is TFP spec.

I'm considering using CV-600 Catalytic Enzyme Water Cleaner to restore/enhance my water clarity.

Any thoughts?

 

[kimkats]

Here at TFP we do not believe in using stuff like this. Most problems can be taken care of by using this stuff:

Pool School - Recommended Pool Chemicals

I am also going to ask our resident chemical guy to give a look see at this stuff so we can know for sure why to or not to use it.

As for the sand in the filter. I do not change mine out. I DO take it out and put it in my large wheel barrow and flush it real good that way. I might not even need to but it makes me feel good and is not that hard. I use a shop vac to get it out of the filter.

Please hold on for Matt to get here. He may be in the middle of family time.

Kim

 

[pooldv]

We are not big fans of alternative sanitizers. None of them are approved for use as sanitizers in pools or spas and all must include language that says that chlorine is also required to properly sanitize your pool. So, we recommend avoiding the extra expense and side effects related to enzymes, minerals and others things and stick with chlorine.

More here, Alternative sanitizers and pools--The Truth!!

 

[triptyx]

ChemGeek did a writeup on their enzyme plus phosphate removal in 2010:
Orenda Technologies PR-10000 and CV-700 Products

On the whole, what you need instead of magic elixers is good, old fashioned chlorine. Keep up the SLAM and you'll be clear soon.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Why would you use an enzyme-based cleaner for water clarity purposes? You could certainly use a clarifier or flocculant depending on what you need to do, but an enzyme cleaner is not likely the right approach. Your front-up approach should be to deep clean the sand filter to ensure that your media is not channeled and is free of debris and then add pool-grade DE (diatomaceous earth) to the filter to enhance the filtration.

For the purposes of being clear, enzymes are organic catalysts whose purpose is to speed up oxidation or reduction reactions that would normally occur at too slow of a rate to be useful. Enzymes are specific in nature in that they typically will only act on a very specific set of organic compounds and then be virtually invisible to all other types of organics. If they are to be used to speed up oxidation reactions then dissolved oxygen is usually required. Unfortunately what they don't tell you is that pool water has very low levels of DO and so the oxidation reactions are usually limited in rate by the concentration of reactants, not in the concentration of the enzyme itself. The example they use on their website YouTube video is silly at best - the shoot WD-40 into the water which would be like dumping a 50 gallon drum of crude oil into your pool and then they used what looked like a 1:1 mixture of their contaminated water with the fully concentrated enzyme product. So tell us, do you plan on dumping thousands of gallons of this product into your pool?? Even at the ridiculous levels they used in their experiment, you can barely see the fizzy reaction between the oil and enzymes. Chance are, the only thing that enzyme product is going to do is increase your FC demand (because enzymes are broken down by chlorine) and increase your organic contamination load in the water.

So, my suggestion is you save yourself the waste of time and money that is those enzymen products and you focus on cleaning your filter sand and adding the DE. If that doesn't help, you could always try a mild clarifier product such as the one sold by Orenda to help you out. While sand filters are very easy to use, their "Achilles heal" is their limited ability to filter fine particulates; they can be very frustratingly slow at clearing as pool. If you have bug problems in the future, I suggest you add 50ppm borates to your water as borates do a very good job at killing insects.

 

[jackrogue]

Why would you use an enzyme-based cleaner for water clarity purposes? You could certainly use a clarifier or flocculant depending on what you need to do, but an enzyme cleaner is not likely the right approach. Your front-up approach should be to deep clean the sand filter to ensure that your media is not channeled and is free of debris and then add pool-grade DE (diatomaceous earth) to the filter to enhance the filtration . . . If that doesn't help, you could always try a mild clarifier product such as the one sold by Orenda to help you out. While sand filters are very easy to use, their "Achilles heal" is their limited ability to filter fine particulates; they can be very frustratingly slow at clearing a pool. If you have bug problems in the future, I suggest you add 50ppm borates to your water as borates do a very good job at killing insects.

Deep Cleaning a Sand Filter

Definitely excellent advice from you "pool veterans" --- thank you, all responders!
Filter deep cleaning is on my to do list. I'm thinking that our filter has never been deep-cleaned --- surprises may surely await.
I also will check out borates as insect terminators.

 

[kimkats]

I have been known to take my sand out with a shop vac and dump it into my big wheel barrow. I get LOTS of bugs and small stuff that just does not come out unless I do this. Once it is in the wheel barrow I "flush" it that way. I use my hand to get out any thing I can grab. IF you decide to go this far make sure you set the stand pipe right where it belongs, cover the end of the stand pipe with a cup to keep sand from going down it AND fill the filter half way with water to help protect the the laterals from the drop of the sand. I hand place the sand until the laterals are well covered.

Kim

 

[needsajet]

I noticed 'daily' backwashing in your comments. You can wait to backwash until the filter pressure is 25% higher than the 'clean' pressure (the pressure right after backwashing). Sand filters start to work better after the pressure has risen a bit (that is, somewhat dirty)