Siamese said:
It's seems like there are a lot of folks on the forum dealing with ammonia problems this year, myself included. Got me to thinking, could this be a possible way to lower a severely high CYA reading?
There's obviously some bad side effects, but could introducing the right CYA-eating bacteria to a pool be a possible solution vs a drain/refill or a RO treatment?
A backbone of TFP teaches is that testing is key: It is generally the very first question asked to every problem presented.
Without testing NH3, we are "assuming" that we are seeing a lot of ammonia in pools - saying that "it seems like there are a lot of folks on the forum dealing with ammonia problems this year" without actual testing is assumptive, and could be incorrect - with the potential of leading us down many wrong paths. It would be like me saying, "I put in 4 lbs of CYA a while back, so my level is 'x' ppm..." When we all know that without a current and correct test reading, it could be 10ppm, or 1000ppm.
My points in the prior posts is that NH3 (ammonia) in a biologically active environment (like an aquatic environment - which is much like a swampy pool) is difficult to sustain, as it gets reduced quickly to NO2 and NO3 - and in the right environments gets further reduced to N (if you smell rotten eggs, or see black-ish goo on the bottom - you've made it this far and have the entire "circle of life" for N).
Ammonia is toxic (to aquatic life) in measurable levels above 1ppm when the pH is greater than 7.0 (ammonia toxicity begins to exponentially increase once pH crosses 7.0), yet many of our "ponds" support pollywogs, frogs, insect life and insect nymphs - and our local authority throws mosquito fish into repo'ed homes with green pools, and these cousins of guppies breed/multiply by the thousands.
While the CYA breakdown is through NH3, in a biological active environment it is likely converted to harmless NO3 faster than it can be measured. IF it is converted to NO3 through this process, then most of the FC consumption is likely through the oxidation of organics, and not interaction with NH3 (although the reduction of CYA to NH3 also likely increases how large the organic load is, and how fast it grows).
I am in a somewhat unique position in that I have the test kits, and get quite a few clean-ups (there might be a few others on the board as well who are able to do this). Since I have the kits, I'm going to start testing for NH3 (and NO2/NO3) on most new pools we get that have been at 0 FC and starting to turn, or have already turned, into a biologically loaded organic mess.
Let's see what the data really shows...
- Jeff
p.s.: Richard, it also occurred to me that a Nessler kit should be fine - as long as we haven't started the SC process yet, and there is no measurable FC or CC.