TA level stays at 120

[Pool22H]

My pool is about a year old & this is the first full summer we’ve used it. Most of the chemicals look great & it stays clear, but my TA is always high. I’ve been using muriatic acid & then aerating to try to bring it down. It has only brought it down a little bit. Is there anything else I should be doing?

 

[Texas Splash]

If you feel as though the TA is not responding adequately to your acid applications, do the following. Allow the pH to hit 7.8 or even 8.0, then use enough acid to lower the pH to 7.0-7.2. That larger dosage of acid "should" help to have more impact on the TA. Of course the TA will try to creep up every time you add new water, but it should help.

 

[Mdragger88]

Higher ta only makes the ph rise faster it doesn’t really harm anything else.
Aeration increases ph without increasing ta so you can then lower them both with acid.
You can do this aggressively by actively aerating so ph rises faster so you can then lower it (no lower than the 7’s)
or just not worry about it & lower ph whenever it rises to 8.
Once ta gets below 100 each acid dose has a more noticeable effect on ta in my experience.
Once ta gets around 60 or so most people have noticeable slow in the frequency of ph rise.
What is your fill water TA? That has a large effect depending upon how often you need to top the pool off.
In fact it’s good to know your fill water’s
Ph
Ta
& ch so you know how that affects your pool chemistry.
I see you’re using cal hypo on a regular basis - this increases your ch. Too much ch increases the potential for scaling of surfaces & in your salt cell. You want your csi to be neutral to slightly negative.
While a lower ta helps with this there are multiple contributing factors including ch.
you can fiddle with csi in poolmath to see what each change will do.
I suggest using liquid chlorine whenever you need a bump in fc then set your swg to maintain your target FC/CYA Levels
Your fc has gotten quite low for your cya in the recent past.
You may need to do an
Overnight Chlorine Loss Test to rule out something brewing that is consuming your fc.
Have you had alot of rain/ overflow/replaced a bit of water in the last couple weeks?
Your cya & salt have gone down but your ch has increased.

 

[Texas Splash]

The TFP article in case you need it.

Lower Total Alkalinity

A lower Total Alkalinity level can help a pool owner stabalize their pH increase. We'll explain how to lower TA with a little help from muriatic acid.

www.troublefreepool.com

 

[Pool22H]

If you feel as though the TA is not responding adequately to your acid applications, do the following. Allow the pH to hit 7.8 or even 8.0, then use enough acid to lower the pH to 7.0-7.2. That larger dosage of acid "should" help to have more impact on the TA. Of course the TA will try to creep up every time you add new water, but it should help.

Thank you for this!

 

[Pool22H]

Higher ta only makes the ph rise faster it doesn’t really harm anything else.
Aeration increases ph without increasing ta so you can then lower them both with acid.
You can do this aggressively by actively aerating so ph rises faster so you can then lower it (no lower than the 7’s)
or just not worry about it & lower ph whenever it rises to 8.
Once ta gets below 100 each acid dose has a more noticeable effect on ta in my experience.
Once ta gets around 60 or so most people have noticeable slow in the frequency of ph rise.
What is your fill water TA? That has a large effect depending upon how often you need to top the pool off.
In fact it’s good to know your fill water’s
Ph
Ta
& ch so you know how that affects your pool chemistry.
I see you’re using cal hypo on a regular basis - this increases your ch. Too much ch increases the potential for scaling of surfaces & in your salt cell. You want your csi to be neutral to slightly negative.
While a lower ta helps with this there are multiple contributing factors including ch.
you can fiddle with csi in poolmath to see what each change will do.
I suggest using liquid chlorine whenever you need a bump in fc then set your swg to maintain your target FC/CYA Levels
Your fc has gotten quite low for your cya in the recent youpast.
You may need to do an
Overnight Chlorine Loss Test to rule out something brewing that is consuming your fc.
Have you had alot of rain/ overflow/replaced a bit of water in the last couple weeks?
Your cya & salt have gone down but your ch has increased.

You’ve give me a lot to consider-I’ll do some more testing and see if anything helps clarify what is going on.
I was surprised on my free chlorine levels earlier this summer compared to last summer - I used the cal-hypo as a stop gap bc it’s what we had on hand from the pool store before switching to TF method. (There was one week recently when I forgot to turn the salt cell turned back on, after I added salt. ) If I’m understanding your message correctly, when I bumped up the chlorine levels with cal-hypo it could have increased it to such a level that it created scaling, which could affect the output from my salt cell — am I getting the sequence of possible events correct?
We did have 3 inches of rain last week combined with 95+/sunny days so the water in my pool may have fluctuated quite a bit.
It seems like testing my home water to see where I’m starting and adding muriatic acid to lower the pool TA to get my CSI lower, might be my next steps?
Again, I appreciate you’re comments!

 

[Mdragger88]

You’re on the right track!