floater

In my part of North Carolina we have soft water and no liqiud chlorine (i kno, everyone has bleach. lol). so we use cal-hypo and we use tri-chlor tabs. for a 18x36, 20x40 pool we're talking a bucket of tabs ($100) and a bucket of cal-hypo ($100) per year. so two hundo a year, while a grand for the start up of a SWG might seem expinsive, and $500 dollars every 5 years! might sound like alot, do the math. muriatic acid is basically as cheap as bicarb, so the switch is pretty simple.

enough people have already posted that 30lbs of soda ash is alot, but i'll put my two cents in too. you prolly added baking soda, not soda ash. they a simular name, and kinda almost simular chararistics, (apperiantly after 20 years tho, the chararistics switch. lol) but the amount needed for the job are very different. also your pool at 26k would have looked like milk after 30lbs of soda ash. easy mistake tho. with the trichlor tabs just keeping your alkalinty in check with baking soda will keep your PH rite. assuming your water is balanced to begin with. After owning a jetted bath tub for 22 years i've found that even with trichlor tabs i rarley have to add soda ash, as long as i keep my alkalinaty at about 110-120, no less than 100, with bakin soda.

a group of F344 lab rats were giving drinking water that had a concentration of 2000ppm of sodium hypochlorite (chlorine). They only drank that type of water for 104 weeks (2 yrs). and yes, i didnt put too many zero's there. 2000ppm. they studied the rats to see the carconaginic effects of liqued chlorine. for two years. Guess what? no cancer in any off the rats. whats more is that the rats showed no sign of any maleffects. and the only thing they drank was water that had 2000ppm chlorine. 2000ppm, thats crazy. i had to read the article more than once to make sure i was reading it rite. This isn't the same one i first read but its the first one i found now, lol study on rats. (NaClo is sodium hypochlorite) Chlorine kills. but it dont kill us.

take a vitamin c tablet and rub it on the stain, if it goes away then its a metal stain, prolly iron, get your water tested for metals, if 1.5 ppm or less a metal remover wil take care of whats causeing the stain, and a stain remover (asorbic acid) will take off the stain. if metals are higher than that, then we gotta drain part of your pool water and replace it with water that doesn't have metals. (might wanna take your fill water to get tested too, expesially if you fill off a well) the cement might be a tuffy. you dont wanna scratch the fiber glass by scraping away with a steel brush or a pumice stone. but nylon brush aint gonna cut it. it may flake off like by picking at it with your finger nails, or a ice scraper.

Most saltwater systems automaticly "shock" themselves, so "shocking" is normally not needed. If the tester at leslie's saw that you had CAC in your pool then they where right to tell you to shock, prolly with "fresh and Clear," its there non-chlorine oxidizer. Also if your water was cloudy, that could be why he wanted to "shock," useing an oxidizer. the salt systems normally aren't worth much when it comes to verifying there own salt levels. Salt test strips aren't horrible, they ussually do produce correct results, much more accuratly than test strips for PH for example. but they normally need to sit for a few minutes, and if you take your eyes off of them and miss when your supposed to get a reading they will give inaccurate results. A digital meter is the best way to go, but they are normally kinda expensive. Strips will suffice, but before you dump 160 lbs of salt in your pool, you may want to use one more strip to be sure you dont get crazy different readings.