PH Test color shade

[IndoorPoool]

Hi, great website and community. I just received my TF-pro kit with smart stir and have setup an indoor pool. Everything is going pretty smoothly, but I'm stumped on the PH color shade. Basically it's significantly more orange than the reference shades. Not sure if it's a byproduct of borates or ? I also picked up the PH meter, and it eventually drops down to 7.6 ph. Test strips are showing more like 6.8, which seems unlikely, but the extra orange may skew it.

It's an indoor pool that is also covered. My main goal is to keep the best possible air quality possible as it's within the living area and we have small kids. So I'm trying to stay close to the bottom levels of chemicals.

Water values:
PH- ? 7.6 (r-0014)
FC- 2.5
CC- less than .5
ALK- 90
CH- 300
Borates- 35
CYA- test only goes down to 30, estimated currently 20 to 25 or so. The dot shrinks considably at the "30" line. I'm adding about 5ppm more stabilizer now, but really prefer to stay close to 20ppm long term. Assuming I'll need to pick up a difference CYA test.

Not sure how well it will show on the picture, but the 7.5 PH reference square definately has a pink undertone, where as my sample does not. Thanks!

 

[mknauss]

Welcome to the forum!
Use a plain white background for your pH test. What have you added to the water since fill? The TA of our fill water is about 130 ppm and pH over 8.
TFTestkits has a CYA test vial that does go to 20 ppm. It is the one from the TF100. The TFPro uses a small test vial and since nearly all pools need at least 30 ppm CYA, they only have the test to 30 ppm.
I suggest you read ABC's of Pool Water Chemistry.

 

[IndoorPoool]

Thanks for your reply. Fill water had very high TA, so I cycled between adding MA and lots of aeration to bring it down below 100 before moving on from that. The only things added have been MA, stabilizer, 10% bleach, and borax. I have compared in front of white paper as suggested, I just needed more light to get it to show up in a photo. The orange hue is present in both cases. The orange in the PH reading didn't seem to show up until the end, so I suspected the borax may have played a role.

I've read as much as I could find regarding indoor pools and air quality and the consensus seems to be that for an indoor pool CYA of 20 to 30 is acceptable. That coupled with 30+ppm borates should hopefully keep it pretty stable. Our bather load is low and so far the FC drop is very slow.