First ever test - new pool

[y_not]

I have used these very tabs before, wasn't impressed with them at all. As was said, they just go soggy after a short while.
You can pretty much pick them up after 1/2 a day or so in the floater and they just go "poof", they're gone within about 24hrs or so and have very little free available chlorine in them as they wouldn't bring up my fresh fill hardly any noticeable amount. Took a few days to even register 0.6ppm.

Not to mention they leave grains on the bottom of the pool and a lovely white dust trails behind the floater as they dissolve more & more.

I recall that JasonLion said they had very little CL in their contents and were mostly salts aside from that.

 

[UnderWaterVanya]

I have used these very tabs before, wasn't impressed with them at all. As was said, they just go soggy after a short while.
You can pretty much pick them up after 1/2 a day or so in the floater and they just go "poof", they're gone within about 24hrs or so and have very little free available chlorine in them as they wouldn't bring up my fresh fill hardly any noticeable amount. Took a few days to even register 0.6ppm.

Not to mention they leave grains on the bottom of the pool and a lovely white dust trails behind the floater as they dissolve more & more.

I recall that JasonLion said they had very little CL in their contents and were mostly salts aside from that.

Were the one's you used the same exact brand and type? How much did they weigh? Assuming they weighed 7 oz (similar to Trichlor) the ~ 48% calhypo should have raised a 3500 gallon pool over 7ppm per puck (but again I'm making an assumption on the weight).

 

[y_not]

Were the one's you used the same exact brand and type? How much did they weigh? Assuming they weighed 7 oz (similar to Trichlor) the ~ 48% calhypo should have raised a 3500 gallon pool over 7ppm per puck (but again I'm making an assumption on the weight).

Exactly the same, just checked.
These are 9-7/8oz, I weighed 3 of them, 1 weighed a little less at 9-3/4oz.
CalHypo, no stabilizer, same MSDS, same SKU as the MSDS shows.

I was also fighting with the fact I didn't have stabilizer in there as I hought another tab I was using did, but it didn't. I was confusing stabilizer with conditioner.

According to the MSDS, 40-55% of the tablet is 48% cal-hypo.
Taking a weight of 9.875oz (9-7/8 converted to decimal), X 0.40 = 3.95
Do the same with 55% and you get 5.43125.
That's how many ounces of the puck is cal-hypo. The rest is salt and junk.
Put that number in pool calculator at the bottom for my size pool and you get an CL FC rise of 4.3 & 5.9 FC respectively.

So seeing as I had no CYA in the pool, sorry, was still learning. Then it makes sense it went down so fast.

So are these OK to use if I'm gone on vacation?
Since they don't have CYA in them and aren't acidic, or are they?
Albeit a better brand that's cheaper and has less salt junk in it.

 

[UnderWaterVanya]

Were the one's you used the same exact brand and type? How much did they weigh? Assuming they weighed 7 oz (similar to Trichlor) the ~ 48% calhypo should have raised a 3500 gallon pool over 7ppm per puck (but again I'm making an assumption on the weight).

According to the MSDS, 40-55% of the tablet is 48% cal-hypo.
Taking a weight of 9.875oz (9-7/8 converted to decimal), X 0.40 = 3.95
Do the same with 55% and you get 5.43125.
That's how many ounces of the puck is cal-hypo. The rest is salt and junk.
Put that number in pool calculator at the bottom for my size pool and you get an CL FC rise of 4.3 & 5.9 FC respectively.

When you pick the effects of adding chemicals - choose 48% calhypo and use the actual weight - not the calculated weight. You don't change the weight to reflect the percentage unless you use a 100% calhypo option in the calculator.

 

[y_not]

You use the weight of the whole tablet, despite the fact that it isn't all 100% of X% cal-hypo in the tablet, there are other arguably inert ingredients in it?

The ingredient list on the pail states:
47.6% Cal-Hypo, the rest of the percentage is inert.
Minimum Available Chlorine - 45%.

So then which of the following would hold true, that if you have a 1lb bag of 48% cal hypo, does that bag contain 48% by volume/weight of (100%) cal hypo and 52% inert, or does it contain 100% cal-hypo by volume/weight at 48% strength with little to no inert?
Does that make sense?
Maybe another way.

IE. Are the cal-hypo percentages by strength of the cal hypo blend, like bleach strength, or is it by percentage of how much cal-hypo is in the product? The latter would assume that all cal-hypo is the same strength, it just depends on how much of it is in the product.

 

[UnderWaterVanya]

Actually, the two are similar. Bleach strength is based on how much sodium hypochlorite is in the solution. There are some nuances to weight vs available chlorine but... Essentially there is a portion of the solution made up of sodium hypochlorite. Bleach has various strengths because it is the name for a solution not the active ingredient. But even then you don't adjust the volume to match the amount of active ingredient. Imagine if you took a gallon and then only put 6% of that volume into the calculator...

Calcium hypochlorite in pool chemicals is the same chemical with the same properties. The percentages listed indicate how much of the product is the active ingredient.

So you weigh solids and then use the entire weight and correct percentage strength to account for the different formulations.

-sent with Tapatalk 2

 

[y_not]

Got it, so it's by the amount of "active ingredient" in the chemical, whether by weight as in dry, or by volume as in wet.

So there's no such thing as a cal-hypo powder that's pure cal-hypo with nothing else, that's rated at only a 48% strength. But instead, they made the chemical powder with a mixture of 48% pure cal-hypo powder by weight and 52% other stuff by weight.

Not really sure why I thought otherwise, seems silly in hindsight.
I think because i was thinking along the lines that it contained only a certain amount of a lesser percentage strength of cal-hypo. I was thinking "food ingredients" not chemisty.

Yeah, I knew that standard traditional bleach that we use is only 6% pure sodium hypochlorite, the chlorine salts of hypochlorous acid by volume and the rest water and residual lye NaOH from the oxidation process of the chlorine gas HClO.

Oh well, in my quest of one-sightedness and getting stuck on the wrong idea, I learned something. I think.
I think I already knew it, I just needed to be smacked off my one track minded course.
So thanks for smacking me!

 

[chem geek]

Ingredients percentages you see on labels are by weight, regardless of whether they are solid or liquid. Now there are some mis-labelings when it comes to chlorinating liquid where they sometimes show the Trade % which is the volume % of Available Chlorine, but given how the concentration degrades over time, such subtleties aren't that important. The other number you will often see is "% Available Chlorine" which is the weight % of chlorine relative to the same weight of chlorine gas where, confusingly, only half its weight becomes chlorine in water but as a reference is designated as 100% Available Chlorine. This is how a product such as Trichlor can be 90% Available Chlorine yet have nowhere near that amount of actual weight of chlorine atoms (it's instead half that, or 45%).