Auto Pilot ?

[Vann]

I have an auto pilot sc-36 cell. It was installed in November of last year and I am pretty sure everything was balanced correctly at time of installation, but now I that I have had problems keeping cholorine in the water and I was on the phone with their support staff today and I have added salt, chlorine and am in the process of adding CYA-I have been adding it to the skimmer, but they told me to broadcast in shallow end.

The instructions on the bottle say add to skimmer. Which is right ...skimmer? or broadcast?

Thanks

[chem geek]

Cyanuric Acid dissolves very slowly so broadcasting it would not dissolve it effectively (it will just fall to the bottom of the pool and if it's a vinyl pool then that's not good since CYA is acidic). Putting it in the skimmer will have it get caught in the filter and will take up to a week to fully dissolve so if you do it this way then you shouldn't backwash the filter for a week after adding it to the skimmer. CYA is acidic, so keeping the pump running will prevent it from damaging the filter (especially a cartridge filter which probably shouldn't get CYA in it anyway). However, the fastest way to add pure CYA to the water is to put it in a sock or panty hose and hang it over a return flow at the deep end (tying the sock to string to a pole, for example). This usually dissolves the CYA in a couple of days. If your particular brand of CYA isn't very fine and is somewhat granular, you can carefully grind it with a mortar and pestle to make it finer as that will have it dissolve faster (if this produces dust, then it would be good to use a mask).

Richard