Liquid chlorine (sodium hypochlorite) is a mainstay of the pool business, and what most people think of when saying the word “Chlorine." In this episode of Rule Your Pool, Eric and Jarred discuss the ebbs and flows of liquid chlorine as a sanitizer. DISCLAIMER: Different types of chlorine are volatile if exposed to each other. They can cause fires and literally explode. Never store two different types of chlorine in the same enclosed area. Always handle with care and caution.
00:00 - Intro
02:22 - Is bleach the same thing as chlorine?
04:04 - What is the pH of chlorine? And How does it affect the pool?
05:47 - What byproducts does bleach leave behind? Why does liquid chlorine increase TDS?
07:20 - What do you do differently in a liquid chlorine pool compared to a salt pool?
12:12 - How much CYA do you need in a liquid chlorine pool?
14:06 - Where should I keep my alkalinity when using liquid chlorine? Where should I keep my calcium?
19:06 - Final Tip: look out for TDS creeping up - liquid chlorine can leave behind more salt quicker than you'd think.
Connect with Orenda Technologies
RYP_EP18.mp3
EK [00:00:00] Welcome back, everybody, to Episode 18 of The Rule Your Pool podcast. I'm your host, Eric Night. And with me as always now, Jared Morgan, I've stopped thanking you for being here now because it's just this is what we do.
JM [00:00:13] Yeah. Now, I should start thinking you thank you for being here.
EK [00:00:16] Oh, thank me. Yeah, we'll just go back and forth. So last episode we we covered the intro to this four part series on how to maintain certain types of pools. We covered salt systems in the last episode. Now we're going to talk about liquid chlorine. The next episode will be Cal Hypo and the one after that will be Trichlor. So I don't want to get too detailed on these other types of chlorine. We want to focus on liquid chlorine and how to manage a liquid chlorine pool in this episode. Any questions for me before we get going? Jared?
JM [00:00:47] No, I think I think we've had some practice on this topic. We had a minor, minor issue before, guys.
EK [00:00:54] No this is going to be better than the first one that we didn't actually record, but we went through the whole thing thinking it was recorded. So here we are without.
JM [00:01:01] He's pointing at me, guys, he's pointing at me.
EK [00:01:03] Well, without more delay. Let's get into Episode 18 of The Rule Your Pool podcast.
[00:01:13] INTRO MUSIC/NARRATION
EK [00:01:35] OK, as we start every episode in this chlorine series, a little word of warning never mix different types of chlorine together. They don't play nice. It can be very dangerous. It can even be an explosive, I guess explosive. Is that the right word? Explosive risk. Explosion risk. Yeah, they can they can combust. And so you never want to mix things like cow hypo with any other type of chlorine or liquid chlorine with trichlor or anything like that. The fumes can be dangerous. It can cause fires very dangerous stuff. So always store them separately in a well ventilated area. Just make sure you're taking care of these things safely.
JM [00:02:10] Let's just say don't mix chemicals, period.
EK [00:02:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. That's I like you. I should have started there. Good job, Jared. Thanks. You're already contributing so much to this episode.
JM [00:02:21] You're welcome.
EK [00:02:22] [00:02:22]OK, so liquid chlorine. Here's a few takeaways [2.1s] and we're going to kind of run through this pretty quickly because most people know of liquid chlorine because that's what they think of when they think of the word bleach. So [00:02:33]household bleach is not the same that you actually would put in your pool, [2.5s] although it's the same chemical, it's a much different concentration. What you would have in your house is about five to six percent sodium hypochlorite. That's what we call liquid chlorine sodium hypochlorite. But your swimming pool uses between ten and twelve and a half percent sodium hypochlorite. Now, that's important to know because, number one, it's twice the strength. But number two, it has half the shelf life, or maybe not quite half. There's a there's like some ratio of how much faster, but it degrades faster than what would happen in your jug of bleach, in your laundry room, so to speak. Now, Jarred you have some experience with this?
JM [00:03:12] I would say if anybody wants to know the half life of anything, they can get on the computer and do do a nice little search on.
EK [00:03:18] They can search.
JM [00:03:19] Yeah, figure it out if you're really that interested in it. But no, I've I've I've had people call the helpline here and talk about using store bleach, and sometimes I just have to shake my head and it is the same thing. Yes. But no, you're not going to get the bang for your buck if you want to look at it that way.
EK [00:03:36] Well, it's not like it's going to hurt anything. You could put it in your pool. It's just not nearly as strong as what you would buy for pool chlorine. So it's not going to do nothing. It's just going to do half of, you know, depending on how old it is, half of what a normal amount of chlorine would do. Would you agree with that?
JM [00:03:53] Yeah, absolutely. That's the way to look at it. And you're paying a lot more at the grocery store for that bleach at half the strength. And you would be at the pool store.
EK [00:04:02] Yeah, exactly. OK, so [00:04:04]some things about bleach that we need to know: it has a high pH has a very high pH of about thirteen and thirteen out of fourteen. [6.5s] So logarithmic logarithmically that's what like a million times more basic than neutral water. So it can actually really hurt your hands if you've ever touched bleach with your bare hands. It doesn't feel good. Always wear gloves and safety. Of course you want to wear glasses. If it gets on your clothes, it will absolutely bleach your clothes. It will take color out of your jeans. It's it's a it's a real thing. Gerards laughing because he's done it. I'm sure I've done it too.
JM [00:04:39] If if you've walked into a pool distribution warehouse enough times that, you know, offers bleach and guilty, everybody has that work shirt. It's going to have bleach marks all over it.
EK [00:04:49] If you're in the pool business and you don't have that shirt, you haven't been in the pool business very long or you're kidding yourself because you just keep getting rid of those shirts because they do get destroyed. So anyway. What we want to talk about is even though it has a high pH, it doesn't actually raise the pH of your pool that much, it will temporarily raise it. But as we're going to discuss here in a moment, it is temporary because when chlorine actually separates out from whatever form you put it in, whether it's liquid chlorine or a salt, chlorine generator or cal hypo, once it actually oxidize it and kills, it releases hydrochloric acid and actually brings that pH back down. So it it's a slight increase of pH over time, but it's not a major one. So it's got a temporary spike in it, but it gets brought back down and that is affected by water temperature and other factors. So the warmer your water temperature, the faster that will actually come back down because your chlorine is working faster. [00:05:47]And the other thing is it leaves behind salt as a byproduct. So your TDS actually goes up over time. [6.4s] And depending on your source, there's a bunch of them that we've read in textbooks and online. It it seems to be about 17, 15 to 17 parts per million of salt for a gallon of bleach in ten thousand gallons of water. Is that what you understand?
JM [00:06:09] That's what I understand. And I guess the main focus here is the chemical name here. Sodium.
EK [00:06:15] Yeah, sodium hypochlorite. Yes, exactly. So 17 parts per million. It sounds more significant than it actually is because TDS in itself is not necessarily a bad thing until you get a high enough number that can really impact other chemistries. But we're talking way high because think about it like this assault pool. You set your salt level to over three thousand. All right, then, that's your baseline and then you have TDS on top of that and we have articles that talk about TDS, what it really matters is how the TDS impacts your LSI. I know we're using a lot of acronyms, TDS total dissolved solids and how it impacts by lowering your LSI Langelier saturation index. So if you use the Orenda app, you'll see a salt TDS parameter on the Orenda calculator. The higher that number goes, the lower your algaecide goes. So this episode we can talk about how chlorine actually works. But one thing that we really want to cover is how do you manage a pool with liquid chlorine? Now, Gerard, you've been doing this for a very long time. So [00:07:20]what do you do differently in a liquid chlorine pool compared to a salt pool like we covered in the last episode? [5.4s]
JM [00:07:26] Well, I'd say, for starters, there's regions of the United States that are more familiar with liquid chlorine. Obviously, we're in Texas here, so it's becoming more prevalent. But if you live in, say, California up the West Coast or Arizona and Florida for sure, you are very familiar with liquid chlorine because that's that's a pretty dominant sanitizer that's used. Obviously, you can use it in other parts of the country, but that's where it dominates as far as liquid usually comes in pre prepackaged gallon sized containers, depending on where you are, especially in the West Coast, Texas, Arizona. But once you get to Florida, they call them Jerry Juggs and they're two and a half gallon containers that are refillable and things like that. And generally when they're used, [00:08:17]I have always had the rule of thumb where you use 16 ounces of acid to offset one gallon of liquid chlorine that goes into a pool, [7.7s] which we figured out is not really necessary. But I find that it's important just because even though it may have a temporary pH spike, I do want to kind of control that pH during that time frame. And usually it'll offset and get managed and even out throughout the week while you're not there, because we're trying to make weekly visits here as a service guy, very hard to do.
EK [00:08:48] So you're used to using a pint per gallon of liquid chlorine. So a pint of acid to offset the high pH of one gallon of liquid chlorine, correct?
JM [00:08:55] Correct.
EK [00:08:56] So where do you think where do you think that number should be, knowing what we know now?
JM [00:09:01] Honestly, taking the LSI into consideration and honestly not being too scared of a pH around seven, eight, because before we we dove into this realm, you know, we always wanted to get the down at seven to seven three because we were only there once a week. And that's why we were trying to add that 16 ounces to get that pH down after you initially added the bleach.
EK [00:09:22] Because of chlorine strength.
JM [00:09:24] Absolutely. Which now we know more. So if you're listening to our podcast and you're kind of reading our blogs, you know why it's not not as.
EK [00:09:33] *pretending to cough* Cyanuric acid. Excuse me.
JM [00:09:35] I think we've covered that before. So it's really on I would say, you know, half or less.
EK [00:09:42] So about eight ounces at the most.
JM [00:09:44] Yeah.
EK [00:09:45] Now I'm going to nip something in the bud. For those of you listening at home who are not in the industry, if you're a homeowner, first of all, thank you again for being here. Do do not think that you can mix acid and chlorine directly, as we said at the beginning, don't ever mix chemicals directly because that.
JM [00:09:59] You will cough a lot ohh
EK [00:10:01] It can be lethal. So never mix, though. So you would add the chlorine to the pool and once it's in the pool, you can then go get the acid measure that dilute that in a bucket of water, because as we discussed in earlier episodes and we'll continue to discuss the best practice to add acid any time is always dilute. Never pour acid directly in your pool because it'll plunge to the bottom. That's another topic for another day. But you want that time, so you're going to add that chlorine to the pool. Then you will dilute that eight ounces of acid per gallon and then you will add that around the same area that you just poured your chlorine at the most. When in doubt you want less of a correction with acid then you think you might need. So if you're going to air, you're going to air light on acid. It's different with like calcium chloride. If you're not sure how much calcium hardness to add, you're probably going to go heavy on calcium. You don't do that with acid. You would rather air to being a minor correction and not quite getting to where you want to go, because, as Jarrad mentioned, we don't need to worry about keeping down at seven for chlorine strength in a cyanuric acid pool, which is pretty much every outdoor pool. It's not contingent upon the pH anymore. It's really about the ratio between free chlorine and cyanuric acid.
JM [00:11:17] And that's how it's balanced. I mean, if you're using bleach as your your sanitizer, you're supplementing it with tabs. So it's you're using both, but you're hopefully not using as much of the tabs and you're using the bleach instead to get you throughout that time frame. And then the tab dissolves throughout the week to give you Your Grace.
EK [00:11:35] What's a tab?
JM [00:11:37] That's a Trichlor tablet that goes into the Trichlor. Feeder, right, a dedicated feeder.
EK [00:11:43] Yes, the thr- not the skimmer basket, right?
JM [00:11:45] Absolutely.
EK [00:11:46] Do not do not put Trichlor in a skimmer basket.
JM [00:11:49] No. On our app. We do have liquid chlorine dosage rates. And depending on the strength, because there are different strengths on the market, like we said, anywhere from 10 to 12, roughly percent strength. So if you're wanting to know how to dose your liquid chlorine, just use our calculator punching your numbers and it'll tell you depending on which one you have, how much you need to add based on your pool volume.
EK [00:12:11] Right. So [00:12:12]just like with salt pools, just like with Cal Hypo, you want to keep your cyanuric acid to a minimum that's below 50 parts per million. [7.1s] The ideal that we found is about 30 parts per million. Now, if you're only using one Trichlor tab every week or every other week, this is no problem. You're not going to exceed that number. But, you know, as we'll discuss two episodes from now, trichlor pools have been maintained. Cyanuric acid creeps into over stabilization very quickly. And fortunately, I know it's a crisis right now because it's such a shortage of chlorine and the price of Trichlor is skyrocketing because of the demand. But this is actually a great opportunity to get rid of that bad habit of over stabilizing and relying too heavily on trichlor. It's going to be harder to find. It's going to be more expensive. So use less of it. You don't actually need a lot of cyanuric acid, which is a good thing. So if you are supplementing it, make sure you have a feeder and just use as little as possible to supplement the liquid chlorine.
JM [00:13:11] Yeah, not only that, in the colder months, like right now, it's it's cold in the wintertime or early spring. Late fall, you should we typically don't use a whole lot of trichlor tablets. We we will use a liquid and if we need to raise the chlorine level, we'll add the liquid in or another form, cal hypo, whatever it may be. But you can use liquid throughout the wintertime because it's not being used as quickly when the water temperature is this cold. So it lasts longer in the water. And that way that's a good way to stop using trichlor tabs in the wintertime to keep that rise from happening.
EK [00:13:44] A lot of parts of the country, their pools are closed. You know, if you have a cover on, obviously you're not chlorinating at all. So the chlorine will get used up faster in hotter water, but we cover that in another episode. So let's talk about how to actually manage this. We just covered you don't want your CYA to get too high because we're trying to avoid over stabilization, keep our chlorine efficient. What about other things, Gerard? [00:14:06]Let's talk about where should we try to keep the where should we try to keep the alkalinity? Where do we keep our calcium hardness? What are your thoughts on those? [6.3s]
JM [00:14:13] And that's kind of back to our whole manage the LSI There's too many factors, too many variables to input here to say one way to do it. Obviously, there's hundreds of ways to do this, but our main goal is to not fight with your pool. So if that means running your alkalinity at 70 or 80 and maintaining your pH at seven six, seven seven, and that gets you LSI balanced, perfect. Don't fight it.
EK [00:14:40] In order to do that in season, most places around the country are going to need at least three hundred calcium hardness because you're going to have less alkalinity.
JM [00:14:48] Depending on the temperature.
EK [00:14:50] Yeah, depending on the temperature. So I said most places we're not talking necessarily about Tucson or Palm Springs. We could be talking about the Carolinas, we could be talking about Ohio, Michigan. And, you know, the colder your climate, the more calcium hardness you're going to need. But generally, what we're trying to do is we're trying to keep alkalinity, like Jared said, about 70 to 70 to 80. And I know that's different from the textbook, but don't freak out about it because there's a bigger strategy at play. We are focused on the LSI. So your strategy, if you're using the Orenda app, if you don't have the app, it's just called Orenda O R E N D A. It's free. It's in the App Store and Google Play. It's got a calculator on it. Now, most of you listening probably already have that calculator. But what your strategy is going to be is finding a calcium level in your area that allows you to contain your. Now, with liquid chlorine, we know that there's going to be a temporary spike, but we're not so concerned about that. It's temporary, and if you're using half of a pint per gallon, you're not really going to even feel that temporary spike anyway. What we are concerned about the natural drift up through physics and Henry's law, where CO2 leaves the water over the course of a week. So if you're on a weekly route, then that pH is naturally going to go up. We can impact how high it goes by having a lower alkalinity, of course, if we go lower alkalinity. That's why we need more calcium. So everything is kind of working in harmony to maintain an LSI balance. So here's the strategy with the calculator. What you want to do is find whatever that calcium hardness level is that allows you to lower your to about seven point six, maybe seven five at the lowest. I don't think that's even necessary. But probably seven, six. And allow it to rise up to its ceiling of about eight point one to eight point two. When that happens, you're going to realize that you're going to be correcting into the yellow on the LSI, maybe as low into the yellow as you can without going red. Don't be afraid of this, because this is going to rise when you chlorinate and the loss of CO2 over time. So it's actually going to be in the green probably the next day and for the remainder of the week. What we know is if we don't overcorrect, if we don't put too much acid, we don't pour it straight in and it doesn't etch. In other words, you're doing things right. If you are dosing and adding acid correctly, you're not going to have an overcorrection and you're not going to have a rebound. People abuse acid because they're not thinking that it's going to actually go to the bottom of the pool, that it's going to etch. And so all this conventional wisdom that we have to have a lower to have efficient chlorine, it actually comes back to hurt us. So we want to contain by not going to low. Avoiding the rebound so that the naturally rises thanks to physics and it's an unpredictable way and that's a containment strategy. So you've done this somewhat recently when we discovered it. Of course, we didn't actually discover it. We learned it from other experts in the industry. But you've applied it to your own pool. Where do you run your alkalinity right now?
JM [00:17:57] About 60.
EK [00:17:59] OK, so 60. But your calcium hardness is much higher to make up for that lower alkaline.
JM [00:18:04] Yeah it's over 500,.
EK [00:18:05] OK, over five hundred. But your water temperature is cold enough to justify that. Now, do you think you would have five hundred in the summertime?
JM [00:18:11] Well, I do have five hundred in the summertime because it's pretty consistent.
EK [00:18:15] OK, and where do you keep your alkalinity in the summertime?
JM [00:18:18] I honestly, I don't manage my alkalinity. I let my alkalinity kind of fall and be where it wants to be and I offset that with my higher calcium level and then I manage everything else in between.
EK [00:18:31] OK, well, that makes sense. I mean, you've you've come up with a containment strategy that allows the to be predictable and therefore controllable. So one kind of final thought here is when it's out of season. As Jared mentioned earlier, chlorination is not nearly as big of a priority. Chlorine is not going to get used up as fast. It's not going to activate as fast. And things are not reproducing like germs and algae. They're not reproducing nearly as fast in cold water. So your priorities are not as much chlorination in the off season as it is the LSI and Staying Balanced. Is there anything you want to add to this before we wrap up here, Jerry?
JM [00:19:06] [00:19:06]Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that I found using liquid chlorine was the the creep of my salinity levels [7.7s] and kind of how I don't say shocked, but just, you know, attention grabbing it was because if you abuse liquid chlorine and you dump just gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons into the pool, you can really make the salt level go up pretty quickly and unexpectedly. You know, especially in places like Florida, for example, I've been to commercial pools that are on liquid feeders that feed bleach whenever needed. And they're at four thousand five thousand parts, you know, TDS, which creates a whole nother set of issues. So it's mindful be mindful that, you know, everything that we're talking about is don't overuse or over apply chemicals just because you don't need to run a chlorine level at eight, nine, 10 parts just because you're not going to be there for the week. Let's try and be proactive. Let's try and make our chemicals as efficient as possible. Obviously, we have strategies to do that, but, you know, only use what's necessary, try to make it as efficient as possible and let's be proactive. That's that's the goal here.
EK [00:20:19] All right. Very good. Well, let's wrap this up. This has been episode 18 of the Rule Your Pool podcast talking about how you should manage a liquid chlorine pool. Some of the main takeaways. Yes, it has a high pH, but its pH rise is actually not as big as you might think. And if it is, it's temporary. Another thing is it does add salinity over time. If you use a lot of it, if your pool is chugging liquid chlorine, it will have a very high TDS in, you know, a few months, maybe a year. It depends on how old your water is. It's not that TDS itself is the problem. It's that it impacts the LSI in a negative way. And you have to start accounting for that in different ways. And finally, you don't need to have a really high level of CYA even in the summertime. Water temperature has nothing to do with how fast the sun burns off chlorine. It just has to do with how fast chlorine actually works. So keep your CYA 50 partner below and you should be pretty good to go. So as as for a containment strategy, have a little bit more calcium hardness to offset the lower alkalinity and just let your contain and stay within yellow and green on the Algaecide calculator and you should be good to go. Anything else.
JM [00:21:30] Yeah, nope. I think we've covered this one and you know, we had we've had some technical difficulties along the way that nobody knows about.
EK [00:21:38] So through the magic of editing. Nathan, you're the man. Thank you for producing this podcast because we are terrible. All right, everybody, thank you so much. In the next episode, we're going to cover Cal Hypo. I'm Eric, not your host. This has been Jared Morgan as well. We're from Orenda. Thank you for listening.
JM [00:21:52] Thank you.
[00:21:53] OUTRO NARRATION & MUSIC