Skyrocketing Ph: I Give Up!

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Mozartk626

Member
Mar 31, 2021
20
Houston
Man, I give up! I have done everything right by the book and still can’t get my pH to quit skyrocketing. What am I doing wrong? I just checked my borate level and it’s fine. (I don’t quite trust those strips, but they are showing my borate level as 80 ppm, so if anything, it’s high.) I keep pushing my alkalinity down, trying to get it to 70 ppm. Last week I managed to get it down to ~70 or a little under, and my pH did rise slower than it ever has, but that just means it took about 5 days to rise from 7.4 to 7.9 instead of the normal 2 days. Now today when I checked, it’s already at 7.7 after I had it all the way down to 7.3 with alkalinity of 70 two days ago. What is going on? Is it just that my pool is so small (7,000 gallons, 5.5feet at the deep end) that there’s just too much surface area to keep the water from aerating too fast? Could it be that because I have an ozone generator, that it’s aerating my water too much?
 
Is this new plaster?
Let the pH rise to 8 or 8.2 (if your CSI will still be in the proper range) before lowering the pH to no lower than 7.6.
How are you testing your pool water chemistry?

The ozone thing does not help. Unplug it, it does nothing for your pool water chemistry.
 
mknauss said:
Is this new plaster?
Let the pH rise to 8 or 8.2 (if your CSI will still be in the proper range) before lowering the pH to no lower than 7.6.
How are you testing your pool water chemistry?

The ozone thing does not help. Unplug it, it does nothing for your pool water chemistry.
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- Not new. Pool is about 6 years old.
- Refresh my memory- what is CSI?
- 7.6 is contrary to what the Easy Pool Chemistry book says? Why can’t I get my pH to a perfect 7.5?
- It seems like constantly lowering my pH from 8.2 down to 7.6 is going to take a whole lot of acid and a whole lot of alkalinity adjusting, which seems contrary to the whole idea of having a “trouble free pool.” You mean there’s nothing else I can do to stabilize this other than to just let it go out of control and spend all day fixing it once a week?
- There’s no mention of ozone being useless in the Water Coach materials. Seems like it recommends it as a good sanitizer. Is it really just junk?
 
I have a Lamotte digital test kit that I use to test chlorine and pH, but get a test from Leslie’s once a week for my most trusted read.

If you mean how much water is turning over (draining/refilling), I’d say relatively little. With the torrential rains we get in Houston, I’d say a lot of my fill water is rain. It shouldn’t matter though, if I’m maintaining my alkalinity at pretty close yo constant levels, correct? I’d expect it to go up after a hard rain, but if it hasn’t rained all week and the pH is shooting up, it should be the fill water, I would think.

I think you have a point that the water probably stabilizes higher. My water seems to jump up rapidly to 7.9, but then it doesn’t get much higher than about 8.0 if I do nothing.
 
First, you need a proper test kit. See Test Kits Compared. I suggest the TF100 or TFPro. Using pool store results for anything is problematic. The Lamotte is OK for ph and low FC levels. Everything else is suspect.

If your pH will stabilize at 8, leave it. Just monitor the CSI.
 
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention is that my primary choice of chlorine is Cal-Hypo. Don’t know if that’s important. I know pH should initially jump when I add it, which is why I don’t test anywhere close to when I add it to the water. (Which brings up another unrelated mystery I’m dealing with: why is it I can add enough cal-hypo to bring my chlorine up from basically nothing to 2.5 at night after the sun goes down, and then by the next morning coloring is FCL is all the way down to 0.30 again?)
 
Mozartk626 said:
why is it I can add enough cal-hypo to bring my chlorine up from basically nothing to 2.5 at night after the sun goes down, and then by the next morning coloring is FCL is all the way down to 0.30 again?)
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That is a tell tale sign of algae. You need a proper test kit to do an Overnight Chlorine Loss Test
 
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