High Calcium Hardness. How to address?

[miles267]

Our first successful pool season has come to a close. Have replaced our SWG with dummy cell and taken readings.

pH 7.8 (this was my SWG target)
CH 450 (this has been consistent; hasn’t exceeded this level all swim season)
TA 80

Should I be lowering my pH level closer to 7.5 now that the SWG has been temporarily removed during the off-season?

Thanks.

 

[DanielJ]

Have you calculated your csi? I would only mess with the ph if you needed to lower your csi value.

 

[miles267]

OK. Great suggestion. Yes. Am using the Poolmath app. My CSI is very close to 0. Hovers around 0.03, 0.05, etc.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

450ppm CH is not really that high. My pool water is at 1250ppm CH and I can manage the water just fine without any scaling. As others have alluded to, tracking your CSI is the important thing because it embodies all of the various chemical measurements (pH, TA, CH, etc) and gives you one number to look at.

For an SWG pool, you really want to keep you CSI in a slightly negative range, say -0.1 to 0. When my CH was as low as yours, I would keep my chemicals balanced so that my CSI was around -0.15 and that kept everything happy. With my higher CH, I have to be happy with keeping my CSI between -0.1 and 0. I will be draining my pool soon to reduce CH but, for reference, the water is over 4 years old. So, as you can see, even in a high hardness water environment (southwest desert), one can get many, many years of pool use without having to resort to a lot of draining. COnsidering where you live and the high annual average rainfall, you should be able to lower your CH just by simply allowing rainwater to fill your pool on occasion (drain down a few inches and let winter rains fill it up).