What is the correct pool volume?
You have two different numbers posted.
Good question. Good observation. I'm not sure of the volume but there's an entire thread on
how to properly calculate that information over here.
Suffice to say that
I've put about 70 hours of water into the pool over the past 3 weeks through a single garden hose at about 8 gallons per minute which is already about 34K gallons and we still have about six inches to go - and that a floorplan calculation puts the volume closer to the high end toward the 40K range, where the slopes and features make an accurate calculation difficult (and yes, we discussed the titration method but it doesn't matter to me what the size is as I test the water that's in there).
Either way, the TA should be lower from 12 gallons of 31.45% acid.
Get PoolMath and track CSI.
CSI is more important than any individual number.
Keep the CSI at 0.0.
I'm aware that saturation & sanitation are two different beasts, where sanitation is completely under control in that all I need to do is keep the free chlorine at a couple of points greater than 7.5% of the cyanuric acid - as my chosen CYA upper limit is 30 ppm and I only use HASA liquid chlorine and no other chemicals for sanitation.
For saturation, I'm well aware there are ten thousand ways to have the calculations show within +/- 0.33 of balanced, where I've been told by Orenda personnel that even with my saturation numbers in the green, I can still have calcium dust precipitation due to the fact that the calculations are inaccurate when either the calcium hardness or the carbonate alkalinity are well out of normal ranges.
For years I've struggled with this problem - which isn't a problem for the pool per se - but just that it's not perfectly balanced if there are saturation by products even when the calculators say the water should be in the green due to the very high alkalinity and the very low calcium skewing the artificial math of the calculators (which expect more even ranges).
Hence, I'm striving for the suggested 4:1 ratio of TA to CA even though I'm starting from an atrociously unbalanced 1:2 instead - which I need to reverse, and then quarter in order to get my pool into the more typical ranges that most of the calculators are most accurate within. (Please note that I'm well aware that 4:1 TA:CH ratio is not something that is espoused by TFP so I just bring it up as a general guideline - much like the Pirate's Code of Honor is only an initial starting-point guideline to rule your pool by.)
I'm pretty much almost in the range of where I want the TA to be, which is a departure from previous years where I left the TA high and the CH low - but I still experienced calcium dusting.
This year I'm going to try to be closer in the typical ranges for TA and CH to experiment if the calcium dusting disappears merely as a result of being more into the ranges of the calculators.
The main disadvantage of this saturation experiment to get the CH & TA closer within typical ranges is that 3 cases of HASA 31.45% HCl at Leslies is $43.74 per case taxed ($10.94/gallon, taxed), which is an expense of about $130 just to experiment if getting the TA within the range that the saturation calculators are more accurate within makes any difference to the calcium dusting problem.
Hence this is an expensive experiment as I'd prefer to spend that money on
pool nets or
pool buckets or the like - but I'm almost done with the experiment as the CH tested yesterday night at 230 ppm while the TA has been lowered to 160 ppm (with the pH at 7.7, water temperature at 74 degrees & TDS at 700 ppm). The ratio is 1:1.15, which sucks - but it's at least better than 1:2, and closer to the 4:1 that is easy to get to once I get the TA down into the typical ranges that the calculators tend to be more accurate within (because Calcium Chloride is so easy to adjust up - which is much easier than to adjust TA down).
