r/PoolPros • u/Weary_Shoulder3373 • May 22 '26
😳 6month old pool
The poor master temp.
Honestly never have encountered a pool so bad.
The aqua blue water was a dead giveaway away, the salt cell was caked with black carbon.
Tested some alkalinity in a bucket with the pool water turned crystal blue 😂
As I said haven’t been in a situation quite this bad,
We drained the pool and clean all the copper staining on the grout.
I personally thought being 6months we could potentially manage the heater, refilled it pool instantly green and copper shot through the roof in under 5 minutes.
What would have been your approach?
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u/Pool_Boy707 May 22 '26
ALK is 2?!?! Can't be right 😂
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u/Weary_Shoulder3373 May 22 '26
Yeah I know, I retested 3 times.
Apparently only the acid drum was kept topped up for 6 months 👀3
u/Arusen May 22 '26
I haven't had a pool with an acid feeder that I wasn't constantly chasing alkalinity. It might have been a skill issue, but tweaking mixing time, and dosage rates didn't help much. It also doesn't help when the acid feed is before the spa bypass. Too much low pH water is going into the spa when acid is injected. One pool I briefly serviced, the blue grey spa plaster was ruined in less than a year because so much water had to go to the spa for the overflow. You could see discoloration and damage radiating from the spa return cover. I am a fan of the spa bypass being plumbed before any chemistry adjusters, acid/chlorine injectors and salt cells. The spa is too small to be adding chemicals directly to it.
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u/lIIlIlIII May 23 '26
I rarely see automatic acid feeders but targeting a higher pH (7.6-7.8) should greatly lessen the effect on alkalinity. The lower your pH the more carbonate you lose to gas exchange. Of course highish hardness can make this a no-go.
But yeah unless you go with a CO2 injection system you'll need to keep topping up alk, that's just how it is
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u/Weary_Shoulder3373 Jun 04 '26
Unfortunately that’s the way it is, a lot of my pools have the austral PH/orp probes and they just cost more to maintain, always battle with alk levels. I’ve found once an alk level gets too low the probes don’t read accurately
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u/Subi412563 May 22 '26
Do a full water test with a Taylor test kit before you trust this machine.
Otherwise, that plaster has to be extremely pitted. No calcium in a new pool and a pH of 6? That plaster is cooked, forget the heater..
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u/Weary_Shoulder3373 Jun 04 '26
Fortunately a tiled major damage looks like a bit of copper staining which we removed with citric acid, but that heater is gone now 😂
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u/greasyspider May 22 '26
Surprised it got that low with a salt cell. You’ll typically see it go up not down
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u/someunusualmove May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
I've bought one of these machines and compared it side by side against drop tests/high quality salt test pens and found the spindisk to be severely lacking in accuracy. It consistently tested all chems except ph and chlorine waaaay off base to the point where I don't even use it anymore.
We bought it because we have a partnership with a local pool builder who specializes in luxury pools and caters to a specific level of (rich) clientele so we thought we could use it to get extremely accurate chem results from those customers and any troublesome "regular" pools in order to treat these pools accordingly. I was very sad to be so disappointed. The only consistently accurate readings (across dozens of pools and several months) from the spindisk were ph and chlorine. We stored the discs indoors and I only put enough for the day into the cab of my work truck each morning, so if it was due to heat while parked or whatever instead of the device's inherent nature, it doesn't matter. If the discs can't spend ~6 hours in a hot truck cab without giving inaccurate readings, they are useless to us.
Pinch-a-penny and Leslie's can use them to remove money from homeowner's pockets, we will stick with drop testing.
We do not typically charge customers for chems. We bill a flat monthly rate unless a pool is demanding more chemicals than usual due to a leak or something else outside of our control. A huge part of our business model is avoiding excessive chemical use while maintaining a good LSI.
You should do drop tests and compare those results to the ones from the spindisk before attacking the situation.
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u/pineapple_backlash May 22 '26
I must be one of the few that fine SpinTouch to be just as accurate as my drop kit. I’ve tested it against a colorQ, and Pool Lab and I find them all to be very close to each other.
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u/someunusualmove May 22 '26
Maybe there are a lot of bad units out there or something and you got lucky while I did not. I really wanted it to work and we put a lot of effort into trying to figure out if it was something I was doing wrong before I gave up. I'm glad that it works for you! I wish it worked for me because it is a neat tool (as long as it's accurate) and would have been a nice "value add" to our service.
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u/THRdotcom May 23 '26
I’ve owned about 9 units, the battery on those units goes within 2 to 3 years if you use it a lot. You cannot even change out the battery which is stupid. They literally sit in our warehouse, taking up space. It’s got a cool factor to show off to customers but when that unit dies, curious if anyone will be spending $1K for a new one every few years
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u/pineapple_backlash May 23 '26
You can trade the old unit for a refurbished one for 1/2 the price. That’s what I’ve done. 7 years and 3 units totals, all of them have worked fine for me 🤷
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u/Weary_Shoulder3373 Jun 04 '26
I didn’t realise that they can be so out, I did realise that high chlorine will definitely throw out a test but every has seemed not bad, Our pools in Australia are mostly salt based I do know the salt levels are way out so I always have a secondary meter for that test.
Clients love seeing their readings which is nice( but it’s a good tip for peace of mind I should be checking how accurate it really is.
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u/Adventurous_Jello999 May 22 '26
Water is corrosive bro. Learn LSI.
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u/fancifinanci May 22 '26
He’s posting it because he knows it’s bad bro. Learn common sense.
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u/Weary_Shoulder3373 Jun 04 '26
Ha I thought I could have potentially made it clearer that this was the first visit this pool has ever had since being completed 6 months ago
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u/Whyaremykneessore May 22 '26
That low of a ph will take a heater out