Switching from Baq

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J

jposeytx

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Jun 2, 2010
10
Switching to the BBB method from the outrageousely expensive Baqualcil. Starting to fill the pool tonight, setting up pump and sand filter tomorrow. My question is should I put in any bleach or other BB's while it is filling? And how much bleach the first time I put some in for 15,200 gals of water. I have read so many post and haven't seen how much bleach in gallons. Please help, because i'm tired of fighting my pool and not enjoying it!
thanks in advance for any help! :wave:
 
Re: BBB for Beginners

There is an article in Pool School about switching from Baq to chlorine.
Even though you drained and refill you still need to treat it like the "abbreviated" version - read the instructions - you still need to shock.
 
I don't know if its really switching from baq since i drained pool, cleaned everything with bleach water, adding new sand and will clean filter with bleach also. so if anyone can help me by suggesting how much bleach to start with I would appreciate it! thanks
 
You may find you have some residual baq in the pool, so don't be surprised if something strange happens after you put in the bleach. Using The Pool Calculator, you need to add 4 and 1/3 96 ounce bottles of 6% bleach to bring your water to shock level of 13 ppm. If there is still some baq in the pool it will consume the FC fairly quickly. You will need to add 61 ounces of stabilizer (CYA) to reach 30 ppm. Test the water every couple of hours and add more bleach to keep it at shock level. The Pool Calculator will tell you how much bleach you need to add to top off the FC. You will need to keep you water at shock level until you loose 1 ppm or less of Chlorine overnight (dusk to dawn when the sun is off the water), have a CC reading of .5 or less, and the water is clear. You will need a good quality test kit to be able to test the FC at shock level. The TF 100 or the Taylor K 2006 are both good. A less expensive kit will not contain all the tests you need to run to keep your water balanced, and will not test FC above 5 ppm.
 
There usually is a little residual baquacil in the plumbing. Since you replaced all of the water and the sand, you should be able to take care of it very very quickly. You should still follow the steps in the conversion guide, as zea3 suggests, and it will probably all be done in a day or two.
 
Wait till the pool is full and the pump is running. Ideally, you want to add chlorine in the early evening, test and adjust the level an hour or two later, then do any overnight FC loss test, then add CYA the next day.
 
CYA is also called stabilizer or conditioner. It is like sunscreen for your chlorine. You want to keep it around 30ppm unless you are somewhere in the desert where there is a lot of strong direct sun on the pool all day.

If you choose to run a salt water chlorine generator then you can run your CYA up to 70ppm. Dichlor and trichlor are the two powdered "shock" products that contain CYA along with the chlorine. For most pool owners regular use of dichlor and trichlor will raise your CYA too high and render your chlorine ineffective, thus you will need higher and higher levels of chlorine in order to keep your pool sanitized.

This forum advocates liquid chlorine in order to avoid that problem. You could use powdered shock to raise CYA and chlorine at the same time until you reach 30ppm, but you will have better control over how much CYA you add if you keep it separate from the source of chlorine.

If you run CYA up too high then the method to lower it is to drain a percentage of your water and refill with fresh. There are other ways to get rid of excess CYA, one is to have a service that runs your pool water through reverse osmosis and gets rid of CYA and just about everything else in your water for a fee. So far this service seems to be available only in limited areas.

The last way is to allow your FC to drop to 0 and hope that bacteria invades your pool and converts all the CYA to ammonia. You will then need to shock the daylights out of your pool for an extended period of time to get rid of the ammonia! Needless to say, this is the least desirable way to get rid of excess CYA...

Well this is likely more than you ever wanted to know about CYA and in the time it has taken me to type this you probably received 3 answers more concise and much shorter than mine!
 
my pools filled. added bleach 1 1/2 hours ago. going to do first test in about 30 mins. I only have a cheapy test kit from walmart. ( the good one is ordered, just not here yet.) so the cheap test only has cl that goes to 5. any suggestions how to tell what the FC is so i can know how much more bleach i need to add. water is really clear, clearer than it was. hope these arent dumb questions. I'm really trying to catch on. When i get the good test maybe it will be easier to understand
 

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went ahead and tested Cl (over 5 alot yellower than the top #) and pH 7.8. Really think i'm going to leave it and start my CYA tomorrow. I'd be welcome to any suggestions. I'd just hate to add anymore bleach if i don't need to.
 
The test in the WalMart kit isn't good enough to do an overnight FC loss test. It's main value in this situation is to tell you if all your FC vanished or if it is more or less holding. That test measures TC, or total chlorine. But for a number of seconds right after you add the drops it shows FC. Then over the next 30 seconds it shifts to showing TC. The hope is that your FC level will be fairly high and your TC level will be low. So what you want to do is to watch the test and see if the color is shifting.

Do the test normally by the directions in the kit. Hopefully it will go to a rich yellow/orange color and stay steady. If it starts clear or very pale and then darkens you have lost most of your FC and have CC. In the second case, you should add another 15 ppm of chlorine. If it goes yellow/orange and is steady, test again later in the evening and see if you need to add more chlorine then.
 
tested this morning (still using walmart test kit till the good kit comes in). Cl was the same as last night (5+). Just got through testing again and Cl is .5 pH 6.5 TA 160. started CYA today (still working on getting 4#'s in). If i'm doing the pool calculator right it says to add 318oz of Borax for pH, 110 oz of bleach 6%. Does this sound right? Thats alot of borax and I don't want to mess anything up. Thanks again for all ya'lls help in the past and future.
 
I question the big drop in the ph...I wouldn't add anything till youget a good reading..I have never had a big drop like that unless bad reading..I'm new to the bbb method but very easy to do after you get the hang of it...
 
How did the PH get from 7.8 down to 6.5? That is a huge change, and I don't see anything that could have caused that kind of change. I am concerned that one or the other PH test might be wrong.

If you do adjust the PH, it is best to do large PH changes in two or more steps, in case there were any problems with your calculations. In this case, assuming your PH really is 6.5, I would aim for a PH of around 7.2, and then do it in two steps, testing in between to see if you are getting the result that you expect to get.
 
I received my TF-100 test kit today! Here's the results of the test i performed:
fc= 1
cc=.5
tc=1.5
pH=7.6
cya=30
adding a gal of bleach and leaving everything else. water is beautiful, hasn't been this clear and blue in at least 2 yrs. Hope it stays like that and it really is this easy to keep it that way. Thanks for everyones help.
judy
 
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