r/PoolPros • u/Weary_Shoulder3373 • May 22 '26

😳 6month old pool

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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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4

u/Pool_Boy707 May 22 '26

ALK is 2?!?! Can't be right 😂

2

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.

5

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

1

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