Super hard well water usable for pool?

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Mar 9, 2014
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Saskatchewan
OK so I will probably going with a soft-sided above ground pool of some sort this summer :whoot:
Now I need to decide what to fill it with.

We have a high-flow well that draws what can be considered an aquifer with near unlimited supply. That would be great except for that the well water is ultra hard and kind of crappy. And the pump has to lift the water 50 feet up a hill to get to the pool site, so the flow rate isn't that impressive up there.

The pH is pretty good. It is 7.
The carbonate hardness (I believe you are referring to this as calcium hardness here) is off the charts on any test kit I have tried. If the water is boiled, it will form a large amount of calcium carbonate precipitate.
The general hardness is obviously also off the charts.
The water is moderately tinted with tannins (green/brown) and contains 300ppm of nitrates because it was drilled below the cattle yard (previous owners :confused:). The colour will bleach out, though, and the nitrates are fine if you don't actively drink the water.

So, does carbonate (calcium) hardness affect a soft-sided pool much? Will it feel crappy to swim in, as bathing in the raw well water often leaves your skin feeling, well, anyone who lives in a hard water area knows.
 
I know all too well. I've had 700-720 in my well and swam in it for years. If you keep the pH right you'll probably be in good shape. Vinyl pools are very tolerant of extremely high hardness, but to emphasize, keep the pH right. I don't know what your hardness is, but I would suggest the pH be kept 7.4-7.5 and not higher. I never had any scaling at all doing this in mine.

Yes, that is high Nitrate, so don't drink it. :mrgeeen:

If you are sure it's Tannins, I would agree, you can bleach that out. If it's metal, that's another story, so hopefully you don't have any.
 
Thanks for answering my noob Q's Brushpup :)
I don't have a pool test kit, obviously, but I do know a fair amount about water chemistry and have some other test stuff. We are lucky to have no significant metals in the water except a couple ppb uranium.
I've done testing on the water in the past, the colour was tested to bleach out - that's mainly how we determined it was tannins in the first place.

We also designed a small scale lime softening plant that we plan to build this year or next. It should provide all the water we need for the ranch at around pH 8 with as low as 30ppm of hardness, and provide clean feedwater for a denitrifying process. So we could soften the water but to use a currently non-automated batch process it would be a lot of work just to throw it out at the end of the season.

How chlorinated does pool water end up by the end of the season anyways? Is it safe to dump in the pond or will it kill things?
 
No, it won't kill things if you let the Free Chlorine drop first. I agree on the Lime softening. In your pool, just adjust pH and you won't scale it. Highly unlikely anyway, vinyl pools are very forgiving in that regard.

If you know this much about water already, this pool stuff should be quite simple.

Edit: Sorry, I just reviewed your post and edited mine. To be safe, I would let the Free Chorine drop to 0 before putting it in a pond.
 
No, that would take so much Iron the water would be so unappealing you wouldn't want to look at it, much less swim in it. It would be worth looking into, as significant Iron staining would have that effect on you too. It could make the pool really ugly.
 

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