Swimming Pool Tip #40
Swimming Pool Chemistry and the "Gotcha's", continued
You remember: the stuff the salesman left out but that you learned later. All
of life has gotchas. Unfortunately, gotchas are a part of life, and swimming
pools aren't exempt.
Here are a few more pool more gotchas:
- Once you use bromine tabs to brominate a pool, you have a brominated pool,
usually till you drain it. Adding chlorine subsequently will only convert left
over spent bromide, which remains in the pool water, back into bromine,
maintaining all the advantages and disadvantages of bromine.
- If you have enough copper in your swimming pool to kill algae, you have
enough to stain blonde hair and white plaster pools.
- A small overdose of the most popular stain and scale control chemical
ingredient, HEDP, will precipitate unfilterable colloidal calcium phosphonate.
In English, your pool will look like milk till you drain it.
- Using either Yellow-Out or Mustard Master will temporarily eliminate ALL
free chlorine, replacing it with a chloramine, monochloramine. OTO will show a
high chlorine level, DPD will show none at all. HUGE amounts of chlorine will be
required to return your pool to normal.
- Acid washing works by removing the top layer of your pool's surface.
Sometimes this is necessary, but think twice. Your pool surface will always be
rougher after, than it was before.
- Serious pH problems in pools are often the result of having used too much
pH UP or pH DOWN.
- Chlorine compounds that look or smell alike may not be the same: you have to
know the actual chemical. Allowing even small amounts of different chlorine
sanitizers to touch each other can be REALLY dangerous. In particular, trichlor
and calcium hypochlorite can react dangerously on contact with each other. [Once
they're dissolved in the pool, though, they get along fine.]
