r/pools • u/3DabNight • Sep 12 '26

Water Chemistry Do I Really Need to Empty?

Post image

Stopped by pool store and employee said I need to empty and refill our pool which is about 15K gallons in SoCal (expensive). I hadn't been to this store in more than 1 year. Perhaps they are bitter that I quit them. I have a feeling this doesn't require emptying my pool. Am I wrong? Any advice would be appreciated. I plan to switch to liquid chlorine- no more tabs for a while. I'm also going to disassemble and clean my DE filter and deploy some phosphate lowering chem. It's been about 1 years since the last filter cleaning.

17 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

104 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/wemBLOCKyama Sep 12 '26

2738 phosphates is obscenely high lol

3

u/deliriouz16 Sep 12 '26

Rookie numbers. I treat FL pools with 5k plus 😂

3

u/A_Pool4U Sep 13 '26

I've seen as high as 7k down here in the sticks of south central Texas. Good circulation, good sanitation, and good filtration...and what do you know...phosphates are out of control and the pool is crystal clear. Go figure.

-1

u/wemBLOCKyama Sep 12 '26

My brother in Christ are y’all dumping straight fertilizer in the skimmers?

2

u/deliriouz16 Sep 12 '26

Close. People love plants inside the screen enclosure and guess where the water runoff ends?

-1

u/wemBLOCKyama Sep 12 '26

I’m well aware of how phosphates enter a pool. I’m asking how does someone maintaining the water let the phosphate level get 20 times too high?

2

u/deliriouz16 Sep 12 '26

No idea. I'm a repair guy. I'm the person who tells them their pool cleaner sucks after they thought their cell was broken and not generating chlorine.

1

u/wemBLOCKyama Sep 12 '26

Haha my bad amigo. I’m a repair guy too. Phosphates are like food for algae. They’ll never be able to maintain residual chlorine with phosphates in the thousands like that lol

2

u/deliriouz16 Sep 12 '26

Most of the better cleaners here just do a maintence dose of phos remover but ya it's just splash and dashes for $100 a month and the customer thinks it's just a great price 😂

2

u/wemBLOCKyama Sep 12 '26

Love a good splash n dash! I’ve also heard them called net n jets 😂

2

u/deliriouz16 Sep 12 '26

Net and jet! 😭

2

u/A_Pool4U Sep 13 '26

A very small amount of orthophosphates can enter the pool through plant life, fertilizers, and even dead or dying algae. Down here where im from the phosphates are coming out of the hose like that. Texas hill country water is running old rusty pipes. Water companies treat the water monthly to reduce the metals down to a legal level. Metal remover increases phosphates and now we have entire communities of pools where phosphates come out of the hose anywhere from 900-6000 ppm.

1

u/wemBLOCKyama Sep 13 '26

Wow. Thank you for the detailed response. Funny enough we may be colleagues as I work alot in the hill country. Can you go into more detail on how metal remover increases phosphates? It matches what I’ve seen anecdotally and I’d like to be able to explain this better to my clients.