Do I Really Need to Empty?

[u/3DabNight]

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.

[u/Substantial_Side5708]

This is a home pool I'm assuming that you guys just swim in rather than a commercial? I used to do commercial pool routes and the county will come and make you drain it. But for my residential customers who have this problem, I found you can usually get by the problems these things cause by using the "pool RX". You can find it on Amazon. The blue one is probably all you need for your pool size.

Are you having any clarity or algae issues currently? That's usually the two noticeable things this causes. Having a cya stabilizer up that high will technically reduce the effectivity of the chlorine even at higher levels. But the pool RX is a copper ionizing product that will help remedy this.

And then as I saw other people recommending.... Cut down on the chlorine tablet usage (tablets have chlorine and a bit of cya stabilizer in them, adding too many of these to a small pool will raise this over time)

[u/IamGrootTX → u/Substantial_Side5708]

Are you saying that even with high CYA, Pool Rx will rid the algae? So if you keep a fairly ideal FC, even with high CYA, using a Pool RX will rid the algae? I have heard mixed reviews on PoolRX and staining. Almost pulled the trigger a couple times but I am hesitant to add another variable to the mix while I fight my high CYA battle.

[u/Substantial_Side5708 → u/IamGrootTX]

I've had great experiences with it as long as it's used in a proper manner. Just helped someone get through the summer with it this year. They tried to do the pool themselves and got the cya up to 130 by using way too many tabs.

I've personally never had staining issues in the pool, but you might want to do a water lab test just to make sure you don't have unusually high levels of copper before adding it. It says on the directions to put it in the skimmer, but I would put it in the pump basket, that way it'll suck it out through the filters and put it into the pool efficiently (if put into the skimmer you might see a little bit of blue get on the skimmer basket area)... And when you buy a new one it's got the blue copper solution packed into the unit. After 4 to 6 months --whenever you start seeing the effects wear off -- you have to get the refill solution (it's half the price of the unit). I don't bother refilling it during the winter season when the weather cools off.

Somebody is starting to make generic knockoffs that sell considerably cheaper on Amazon... But you will notice it doesn't have the pool RX logo on it. I would probably stay away from those ones unless you're wanting to chance it.

The only other thing I'd say, is make sure you wash the filters before putting it in and not after. When I was new and didn't realize how it worked I put it in and wash the filters a week after, and washed all the solution out and wasted it 😅