[Help! Cloudy Water And Party In 2 Days!]

Thanks Richard for the reply - My PH is extremely low and initial test with the strips indicate the hardness is within spec. The CH levels will not stay up, I can get them up to about 5 ppm for a day with 2 lbs of shock, but they are right back down in two days even with a auto-chlorinator (using chlorine at an alarming rate with no result). Just to be clear - the water did get cloudy but only the undissovled soda ash turned brown. I was raising the PH based on advise from Leslie's from my water analysis

Thanks

Andy

Andy,

For well water or any water high in metals, you want to avoid a high pH since that will precipitate metals causing either the water to turn color (brown is usually iron; green is often copper) or to stain or both. Soda Ash is sodium carbonate and raises both the pH and the TA. If the well water is high in either Total Alkalinity (TA) or Calcium Hardness (CH) or both, then the water is likely to be very saturated with calcium carbonate. Adding soda ash to this will cause the water to cloud and excess soda ash will form calcium carbonate crystals that just sit on the bottom and won't dissolve until the water becomes less saturated. You can use The Pool Calculator to calculate the saturation index for you water -- if it's strongly positive then increasing TA or CH or pH will cause cloudiness, scaling, or undissolved product.

Adding baking soda will increase TA with not much change in pH. Though not as dramatic as soda ash, it can still cause the same problems as noted above if the water is already saturated with calcium carbonate. You really need to get a good test kit as I described in an earlier post in this thread. For metals in the water, you need a metal sequestrant. To lower Total Alkalinity (TA), you need to follow the aeration + acid procedure described in this post. Lowering the CH is difficult if the well water used for fill is high in CH.

Generally speaking, if your pH tends to rise and not drop, then you don't need a very high TA level. If your CH is very high, you can have a much lower TA level and still have saturated water which you want for plaster pools, but the lower TA will outgas carbon dioxide more slowly making the pH rise more slowly. Lowering the TA to 70 ppm can help; I wouldn't go below 50 ppm in any event, especially if the CYA is higher then 70 ppm is as low as I'd go.

If you are using Trichlor tabs/pucks (see my cautions about rising CYA in an earlier post in this thread), then you can use 20 Mule Team Borax to raise the pH with half the rise in TA compared to soda ash. However, you normally want a higher TA when using an acidic source of chlorine such as Trichlor, but having 120 ppm TA in a pool that is high in CH can over-saturate the water making water balance difficult.

Richard

[Help! Cloudy Water And Party In 2 Days!]

I had a similar problem. I have a well with very acidic water which I mitigate using Grade 100 Soda ash in a 50lb bag and a chemical injection pump. I have not been completely satisfied with the "dissolvability" in my chemical tank for the well, so I figured I'd give it a shot in the pool which also has very low PH. When I added it to the pool it turned brown and sank to the bottom undissolved and clogged up my DE filter. I'm going to Baking Sode in my pool and chemical tank. Just curious if there was any thoughts on my this stuff won't dissolve and turn brown in a pool.

Thanks

Andy

Richard, thanks for the response. As I'm sure you can tell I am new at this. This is actually my mother's pool, and since I live next door I'm relegated to the maintainance duties. lol The pool was just put in last year, so I'm learning more every day. I forgot to mention the particulars of the pool, which is..its a 22,500 gal pool printed vinyl liner 8' deep end.

BTW..yes it WAS 40 pounds of soda ash..they were out of their consumer brand of soda ash so she sold me a 50 pound bag they use for commercial pools. Not sure about the cumps you are speaking about, since I cant see below about 20 inches, but I dont think there would be many clumps. I made sure I brushed the bottom thoroughly after adding any chemicals.

I went to my local pool pros shop yesterday and they pretty much told me what you just said. She recommended 2 gals of muriatic acid to start..one gal in with pump off for 2 hours, then the other gal in and pump on for 2 hours. Then she wanted to test the water agai, which I did. The first readings were very high as you suggested. The TA was 322 and the Ph was 8.8. After the acid doses and about 3 hours later the TA came down to 164 and the PH down to 7.8. She gave me another 5 pounds acid to administer and some floc vac, which I have started using this morning. The acid did nothing for the milky cloudy water, but she said the floc should clear it up. Not sure it will be clear by tomorrow though. If you have any other suggestions I would greatly appreciate it! Again this is a new pool and I'm actually trying to get my mother to understand the importance of a balanced pool. Other ppl with pools she knows tells her "oh well all I DO is add shock and chlorine and thats it". Ive researched enough myself to realize that thats NOT all there is to it. ANyway thanks again!

Tony

Test the pH and lower it to around 7.2 using Muriatic Acid and the water should clear up. If after lowering the pH to 7.2 you want the pH to be up to 7.5, then do not add any pH Up but instead just aerate the water. The water is cloudy because it has too high a combination of pH, Total Alkalinity (TA) and Calcium Hardness (CH). The only thing you can adjust quickly is the pH and it's probably too high due to the pH Up.

Be sure to pour the Muriatic Acid very slowly over a return flow at the deep end with the pump running and then lightly brush the side and bottom of the pool where you've added it to make sure it thoroughly mixes.

If I assume your pool is 15,000 gallons, then 40 pounds of Soda Ash would raise the pH to something like 9.9 and the TA to 400 ppm or so -- yikes! It will take 4.7 gallons of Muriatic Acid (31.45% Hydrochloric Acid) to bring the pH back down to 7.5 though the TA will still be high at 240 ppm or so. Do not add all the acid at once. Add no more than 1 gallon at a time (again, assuming a 15,000 gallon pool) and then after an hour with the pump running measure the pH, then add the next gallon, etc. You may find that you will need more acid than I described because as you lower the pH, the high TA level will force the pH back up some (from outgassing of carbon dioxide -- you've essentially made the pool way over-carbonated).

Are you absolutely sure you added 40 pounds of Soda Ash? 4 pounds sounds more like what you may have added in which case that would only take 7.6 cups of Muriatic Acid to restore the pH.

This is not an easy thing to fix, but it can be done as described. I suspect that you may have some of the pH Up in "chunks" that are undissolved in the pool. You should first remove that before anything else. Also, you may find that your filter gets clogged and that you have scaling on the walls. Remove what you can and clean the filter, but then get started on lowering the pH as soon as possible (i.e. remove physical scale or calcium carbonate chunks that are easy to remove, then add acid to clear up the water and redissolve the rest of the scale).

Richard