Why is Orenda doing something so radically different than it has been done for so long? And why is it working? Eric and Jarred talk about the philosophy of the Orenda Startup in the first of a two-part series.
00:28 - Topic Introduction
02:33 - Setting Expectations of What A Startup Can and Can't Do
06:54 - What is Plaster Dust?
10:14 - Why You Always Need To Test The Tap Water
13:22 - Why are The First 30 Days So Important
17:42 - What Can't A Startup Fix?
20:55 - Why Are Hot Starts Bad?
ERIC [00:00:00] Welcome to Episode 12 of The Rule Your Pool podcast, I'm your host, Eric Knight. And with me, as usual, co-host Jared Morgan. Jared?
JARRED [00:00:11] Happy to be here. Couldn't think of anything better to do today.
ERIC [00:00:14] Oh, yeah, me neither. It's not like we have jobs. So this has been kind of a long time coming. This is a big topic for us and we wanted to get a few other things explained before we got into this. But today we are going to do a [00:00:28]the first of two is a two-part series on the Orenda startup [4.3s] and why we do it. [00:00:34]And today we're going to talk about sort of the philosophy, [3.0s] why do we do this? What is the chemistry? [00:00:40]Why are we doing something so radically different than it has been done for so long? And why is it working? [5.1s] We are not going to talk about the procedure in any specifics in this episode. That's going to be the next episode, which will be 13. So if you want to skip this, feel free. You can go to 13. They'll be published a couple of weeks apart, I guess. But, you know, most people binge podcasts anyway. So in this episode, we are going to be basically talking about the overview. Thirty thousand feet. What are we actually trying to accomplish? We're not going to get into the weeds of the specifics of how to do it in this one, [00:01:17]but basically what our startup can and cannot do and set expectations. [4.0s] So, Jarred, is there anything you want to add before we get into it?
JARRED [00:01:25] Yeah, you specifically said what is so radical about what we're doing, but hopefully after this episode, you will get an understanding of how not radical this is at all and how it just makes sense.
ERIC [00:01:38] Yeah, well, that's true. I kind of said it tongue in cheek because it does make a lot of chemical sense. And when you when you understand the chemistry, hopefully this episode will get you there. You're going to realize why wouldn't I do this? It actually makes the most sense for the segment. And that's that's the hope. And it does work. And so we've got a lot of field evidence to show that it is very, very impactful. So without further ado, this is Episode 12 of The Rule Your Pool podcast. Let's go.
INTRO [00:02:11] [INTRODUCTION NARRATION & MUSIC]
ERIC [00:02:33] [00:02:33]OK, let's set expectations up front. [3.6s] A startup is not meant to clean up a surface after it has been applied. And when we say a surface, we're talking about cement based surfaces. This is: pebble quartz, marble dust, just normal plaster, whatever you call it. Anything with cement in it needs a proper startup. We would argue even vinyl and fiberglass pools need a proper startup, but, you know, they don't have a cement reaction that interacts with the water. So the timing is not nearly as urgent. So we're going to focus on cement based finishes. And the general gist of [00:03:11]what we're trying to do with the Orenda startup is we are trying to feed the water so that it doesn't feed on your new surface. [6.6s] Jared, is there a simpler way that you can say that?
JARRED [00:03:22] The only thing we say is pretreat it as it's going in, that's it.
ERIC [00:03:26] Yeah, that's pretty much it. And we're going to discuss the specifics of how to do that in the next episode 13. But for now, what we're trying to do is take away the water's ability to interact with your cement, see cement cures in an interesting way. So the guys who are plastering, they have these bags of cement and beautiful pebbles and whatever else, some of them are premixed. Some of them are separated by Portland white cement and then maybe some pigment and maybe some pebbles. And they mix them in this auger on a truck and they pump this stuff in there and they start troweling it into place. If you've ever seen it, it's a really cool procedure. But when water is introduced into that auger on the truck, a reaction begins. Actually, a lot of reactions begin. So water gets put into this auger with this dry cement. And when Portland Cement meets water, there's something in Portland cement called calcium oxide. Calcium oxide meets H2O. You get this new substance. And Jared, we refer to it all the time. What is that substance called?
JARRED [00:04:28] Calcium hydroxide.
ERIC [00:04:29] Oh, beautiful. Calcium hydroxide. And by the way, for those of you listening, if you want more information on this, all of this stuff is available on our website. It's also available. A lot of it came from the National Plaster Council. A lot of it came from on balance. And they conflict with each other in some regards. But nobody really disagrees with the chemistry of how this stuff is actually curing. So curing and hydration, these terms sometimes get blended together and we don't need to really get too much into the weeds. But basically, the essential thing that you need to know is. If you do your start up right, the water that fills the pool should be completely ignoring the cement. If you take nothing else away from this episode, [00:05:17]that's what the Orenda startup is trying to do, it's trying to make sure the water is ignoring the cement. [4.9s] Now, there's some natural interaction where the water is helping to carbonate these hydroxides in your cement, which is a good thing because calcium hydroxide is the most soluble form of calcium. You want it to carbonate into calcium carbonate, which is much harder. It's harder to dissolve. So there's going to be some natural interaction, let's say, from the water out, i.e. from the pool water pushing into the concrete. Think of it that way, pushing into the cement. That's a good interaction because that's carbonation. And if you think of it kind of like this half inch of plaster that was just troweled on is kind of like a steak. Think of it like your heating and searing that steak. That's an analogy that I use a lot. You want that to happen. You want that reaction only going in one direction where water is pushing against that cement chemically and carbonating it. That's a good thing that searing the steak is helping a cure properly. Moisture Is also trying to leave that cement, though. And I know it's submerged, but the pool doesn't fill up immediately. Even if you have trucks, there's a process. What we want to avoid is reactions going the other direction, we want to make sure that we avoid things from the cement being leached out into the water because the water is hungry. That is critical because if we can stop that, your pH doesn't spike and you don't have plaster dust. [00:06:54]Jared, can you give a little overview of what plaster dust is so that the listeners know? [4.6s]
JARRED [00:07:00] So plaster dust, for the longest time, was just inevitable. It was a thing that every startup company, when I say startup company, when the pool gets fired up, you show up on the day one and you start brushing, brushing, brushing, brushing, brushing and brushing. Plaster dust is what's sitting on the floors, the steps and white, cloudy usually and takes a lot of time and a lot of work to clean up, which there were. And there are a lot of shortcuts to remedy that problem. But in our research and our opinions, those shortcuts are not a good thing. And we can touch on those in another episode or another day. But it's the acid bath and hot starts to burn the dust off, which is creating a whole other set of problems in a whole other set of LSI violations that we can touch down the road.
ERIC [00:07:58] Right. So we do have video and we have plenty of articles on our website, Orendatech.com. If you go to the blog and just type in start in the search bar, you'll find them or start up. What plaster dust chemically is, is evidence that your cement lost calcium hydroxide. That's what it is, because calcium hydroxide in your cement was pulled out into the water because the water was hungry. You had a low LSI and it pulled it out into this water. And when it did, it has a very high pH of twelve point six, which locally, right by the surface raises the substantially and therefore you now have a high LSI. I know it sounds confusing. It started as a low. Alisi You pull out this hydroxide, you spike the edge into a high. LSI And that precipitates as calcium carbonate. Every speck of plaster dust that you see was supposed to harden inside the cement. Instead, it got pulled from the cement into the water, it carbonated as dust and fell onto the cement, which you now have to brush up. Does that make sense?
JARRED [00:09:11] It does. And the reason it was pulled and we used the word pull loosely, it was just the water because it was low on the LSI trying to find calcium saturation and it was grabbing whatever calcium we could find, which most readily available sources, the calcium hydroxide. And it just carbonated.
ERIC [00:09:36] Yeah. And it carbonate it in the wrong place. It was stolen. And this is what we're trying to prevent with the with the startup, because if the water I call it raw water, if you put raw water into a freshly plastered pool, chances are that water is not LSI balanced, not out of the truck, not out of the tap, not out of the hose. So when it goes in there, it's going to find equilibrium on its own. So you start filling up the bottom of a pool in the first few minutes. I guarantee it's already eating. If you know, unless you're in like Santa Rosa, California, where we found that the tap water is actually scale forming, which is a that's an exception.
JARRED [00:10:11] Very good point because. Everybody, [00:10:14]your tap water is different no matter where you are, it can be different across the street, can be different from season to season. [6.9s] Day to day. So you have to check the tap water in. Some of the tap water that we fill pools with is actually great, like Eric was saying, where it's a super scale forming and it's actually really good to fill a pool with some of that water. I've had a job, a customer call me on this week. The alkalinity was 470.
ERIC [00:10:43] Oh, my God. That's the highest I've ever heard. I've heard of over two hundred, not four hundred.
JARRED [00:10:48] And I don't think I said I said, hey, that's actually really good water to fill a pool with because you're not going to be etching. So you didn't he didn't have to add a whole lot of calcium. He didn't have to make much adjustments and the plaster turned out great.
ERIC [00:11:02] Yeah. And on the high side, you're going to get some precipitate, but it's not going to be plaster dust. It's not going to be at the expense of your surface. So you can have a condition that we call snowing where the you just have an oversaturation. Either you put too much calcium in or in this case, the alkalinity was too high, or maybe in the case of these pools in Santa Rosa, you know, they got an eight three pH coming out of the tap and they have high calcium and they have high alkalinity. It surprises me that their tap water doesn't just scale in the pipes, but then again, maybe that's the objective to protect the pipes, I don't know. But on their startups, you know what they have to do? They just add SC one thousand and then they add the acid to neutralize the SC-1000 and they actually add a little bit of more acid so they can lower pH out of the taps so that it's in the ideal range, which is the ideal LSI range, not an ideal range. And that's a big mistake. So people think, oh, we got to get this range chemistry to fill the pool properly. Not true, not on a startup. [00:12:01]I'm not saying these ranges don't matter, but on a startup, you're playing a different game because you have a surface that hasn't carbonated yet. [7.9s] It's in the process of carbonating. So you have different parameters that you have to hold and maintain. And we're going to go in depth on that in the next episode. What you're after on Fill-Up Day is an LSI target, and we have found the optimal LSI target is in the green on the Orenda App positive zero point to something zero point two one zero point two eight zero point two nine. Well, anything in that range is a good place to be. You can go a little higher. You do run the risk of a little bit of fallout, but not much. You can be at point three something that's fine. It just depends on how much you want to babysit that pool. Just keep that in mind, we have found the sweet spot to be Green Point two for the first three to five days after that. It's just a green number for the rest of the month because, you know, you're doing this twenty eight, four week in twenty eight day, four week startup as long as it's LSI Balance for those first twenty eight days in general. You did it right.
JARRED [00:13:14] I got a question: why - and this kind of leads into the maintenance and curing times and processes - [00:13:22]why was twenty eight or thirty days so important. [3.7s]
ERIC [00:13:27] When I was speaking to people who know a lot more about this than you and me, Jared, they were all adamant that the first 20 or 30 days, whatever you call it, a month, it's imperative that you treat the pool right for those first 30 days. That means no wheeled vacuums because the pressure from the automatic cleaner like you have on in your pool, you wouldn't put that in in the first month. Same with salt. Salt changes the Alisi because it raises the TDS so much and there's depends on who you ask at some salinity level can actually impact how fast it cures. I've heard. But then I found sources that said it actually increases the curing. I'm not a scientist on this thing. Yeah, just don't do it because they all seem to agree on that and they know way more than I do. So don't add salt in the first twenty eight days. And we have seen builders add it in the first week and it's never successful. There's always light spots on the bottom of the pool. And for some reason people add salt, they just dump it in the pool and then they brush. If you're listening to this and you do this, don't do that. You're going to have a lot more success just diluting it in buckets, I know it takes you an extra 10 minutes, but just trust me, if you pre dilute it and dissolve it before it goes in the pool, you have a lot more success. But we're getting into the weeds.
JARRED [00:14:50] I still have bare rock spots where my driveway has been eaten up because I couldn't get out of my driveway one winter and I put rock salt on there.
ERIC [00:15:00] Oh yeah. Yeah, you did.
JARRED [00:15:04] It just completely erodes away year after year.
ERIC [00:15:08] I bet it did very well. You created an LSI violation. Why does salt water damage a pool deck like a travertine deck around a pool? It's the same thing. Well, anyway, again, we're getting into the weeds on this. So the takeaway is that I want to cover here again of the philosophy. We are going to feed the water what it needs based on the tap water. And what Jared said, I'm going to reiterate because it's that important. [00:15:32]Do not assume you know what's coming out of the tap. [3.0s] If you haven't just tested it within a week, you don't know. Plain and simple. You don't know. And I was in Florida doing a startup at a pool. And you know how Florida is. They have so many pools in the same neighborhood. We literally went across the street. These houses could see each other. There were like three houses apart, completely different water chemistry out of the tap. Why? Because that side of the street had city water and this side of street had county water. Same neighborhood, you don't know, and in Phoenix, how many times have you heard what we have hard water in Phoenix? Yeah, you did in the 90s. They treat water differently in the city now. They protect their infrastructure. They put phosphate sequestering agents in the water. They've softened it. You don't have that coming out of the taps or whatever fills your pool. You have to know to test it.
JARRED [00:16:27] The water tables. How much rain are you getting ready for your water source from? How how are these things being affected?
ERIC [00:16:36] Yeah, and a lot of pools filled with trucked in water. This is a question we get so much. [00:16:40]How do you do the Orenda star for trucked in water? [1.8s] Well, test every truck. We have seen failures where you test the first truck and assume it all comes from the same place, it often doesn't. I did a pool in Virginia where I tested the first truck. I learned this the hard way test. The first truck did everything right. That first bottom of the pool looked great. The second one did not. The third and fourth looked great so for. About three feet in there, there was a lighter shade to it. I realized that that truck came from a different source out of those four trucks. So that's pretty astounding to me because it changed the chemistry that radically. You got to be aware of it. It throws everything off if you're not. So just do your due diligence, be on top of it, be testing. The other thing is you got to know the temperature. It's tough in a truck because it's sitting in the sun, but you have to know the water temperature.
JARRED [00:17:32] So we've touched on the plaster dust, the interaction of calcium hydroxide and the curing process. But we do get calls there. [00:17:42]There are some things this startup cannot address or fix. [4.6s]
ERIC [00:17:48] That's exactly where I was going to go. So go ahead and lead us in there.
JARRED [00:17:52] I mean, we I've done countless startups in in the real world. And this was whenever I first started in the industry, we were doing startups and it was just life. You go you get I get my brush vacuum. You might vacuum every pool. I'd dump a bunch of acid in there to burn it up. And I would battle this pool for at least five days, more like two weeks. And it was tough. Well, there are some things that no matter what kind of startup you do, you just can't fix, you know, whether it's leeching return outlets going down into the plaster because they were full of water, it rained. You got puddle marks and you've got that rain water we talked about in an episode before that as zero calcium in it, it's immediately started that reaction and looking for calcium and the streaks from rain are a big thing, too. Absolutely. And the other thing is exposure. So not necessarily a solid colored finish or like a white plaster, but when we start getting into higher end, quartz finishes, pebble finishes, things like that, the exposure, people want to see that nice pretty stone that is paid for. Well, [00:19:03]if you're relying on the startup to burn off or off that cream on top to get your exposure right, you're asking for problems down the road. [9.8s]
ERIC [00:19:13] That's because we can't. So this is I'm glad you're bringing this up. We are here to set expectations of what this startup does and does not do. Remember what I said at the beginning? We are trying to see the interaction, stop the interaction between the water in the cement from coming from the cement out. Right. We're trying to ignore the cement as much as possible. That means whatever that cement looks like when that water starts filling, if there's trowel marks, if there's streak lines from a bad acid wash, if there's puddles, if there's any of these things already in the pool, consider them preexisting conditions. You're going to see them. Now, the cool thing is some of them will correct. If they're minor, some of them will correct over hydration. And after thirty days, you'll have a much better picture of what it really looks like. But if you had a really bad exposure job, really bad acid wash, and we see it all the time, Jurd, how many times do we get pictures texted to us? How many pools have you been to where there's white puddle marks and big streaking lines? And then they say, oh, your startup did this. No, it didn't. See, calcium and water are both blind. They don't have the ability to decide to make a line right there acid does so. You just follow the path and you can forensically figure out what caused these things. A puddle. Obviously, there was water sitting there or there was acid sitting there and it would be a different look to each one. But the point is, in general, [00:20:34]cement cures ugly. There's a little takeaway if you want to write it down. Cement cures ugly. [6.3s] We need to set expectations right with homeowners that it doesn't have to look perfect in the first thirty days. It has to cure a perfect. Once it cures, you can clean up the surface. I mean, it's much easier, so you mentioned earlier [00:20:55]we don't recommend hot starts [0.8s] and these acid treatments because that's been used as a crutch. It has been for decades. We're going to oh, we're going to hot start it. That's terrible in the first week. But yet that's when they say to do it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just clean up off the cream and it's an exposure job. And yeah, the pool will look great won't it. Gerard, you've done how many hot starts have you done. Can you even count?
JARRED [00:21:15] For a week. Key there: it'll look great for a week.
ERIC [00:21:20] But you've done a lot of hot starts.
JARRED [00:21:22] Absolutely and then usually what happens is after a month, six weeks, eight weeks, starts getting a little hazy, white splotches start showing up. We call it marbling. That's not supposed to happen.
ERIC [00:21:35] Yeah, well, or a year later, I mean, I've seen it six months. I've seen it a year. I've seen a two years later you start seeing the original lines that were done from the acid wash or the original trial marks. And the reason that happens is you didn't cure what's underneath. So let's get back to that steak. We got this half inch of freshly trialed plaster and you're trying to carbonate it from the top in. You're trying to carve it from the water side into the cement. Right? What happens if you don't let that sear and you dump in a bunch of acid is you're going to start pulling the juice from that steak. And it makes it more brittle, it doesn't taste as good, obviously, but we're not eating cement, but although that is a pretty funny visual now that I think about it. So but you're pulling hydroxide out of the steak. If you do that, you can't put it back in. I'm sorry, you can't put it back in what we're trying to encourage you to do is fill the pool in such a way where you pre treat the water so that the steak can cook properly. If there are imperfections and nobody's perfect, these are hand applied. Surfaces. Cement cures ugly, right? So after 30 days, though, when the majority of the curing and that surface has been seared and it's been carbonated properly, you can then do a hot start, but it shouldn't be called a hot start, should be called a low alkalinity treatment or an acid treatment.
JARRED [00:22:55] I've got to say, I like the word acid bath because it's not as aggressive as a hot start.
ERIC [00:22:59] It's not as aggressive and it's not a start. You're already 30 days in. So the start up is about curing the cement regardless of how it looks. And if you do that right, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have a pH spike. And it may look ugly as sin, but you're doing the right thing for the cement under that ugly surface.
JARRED [00:23:16] I would I would I would say it's comparable to you cook a snake, you see it, you let it rest for the 10 minutes it actually threw in the refrigerator. You took it out the next day and then you cut the sear off. Is there any juice that's going to bleed off of that? No, no. That's the same thing. You and you cure.
ERIC [00:23:34] The success that you can have from waiting 30 days after the proper start up before you do an acid bath, as you say. And by the way, we're not doing a no alk treatment, which is pH of four point three or below. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking like a pH of five and a half to six for a few days and brushing you're just cleaning the char off of the steak. Your success is long term at that point. And we were just talking about a job today. I'm not going to say the job, of course, but Jared and I were on the phone today talking about it. And I was on the phone with a plasterer that when I went to go look at this pool, I was shocked that they tried to do a hot start on it. After I specifically said, hey, if you're doing our startup, don't do the hot start for 30 days at least it's going to completely conflict with what we're doing. And sure enough, when I got there, they had already been doing it. The calcium was no longer around three hundred. It was over five fifty. Well, where do you think that extra calcium came from, Jared? Where did it come from?
JARRED [00:24:36] Came straight from the surface. And I've seen it so many times. Houses across the street from each other that were one was a hot start. One wasn't. And you're right, you can get a pool well over five hundred parts calcium in no time.
ERIC [00:24:46] This happens all over the country. If you are impatient on this and you don't let the cement cure the imperfection that you're hiding, it's like you're pulling. I don't know how accurate this, but it seems like you're pulling the juice from under the imperfections and taking the juice, but leaving the imperfections so you don't see them for a while. But they will come back because now there's void spaces and hydroxide has to fill in those void spaces and they turn lighter. So if you have like lit lighter puddle marks, lines, little areas, it's uneven carbonation at that point because you compromise the surface too early, you'd never let it cure. And so what we're trying to advocate for here is if you do have to clean up an ugly pool, wait, be patient, it will help the long term integrity of the surface. And by the way, it's a one time fix, at least from what we can tell you. After thirty days, you do a an acid bath, you clean that thing up. It looks great. I haven't seen one flip back, have you?
JARRED [00:25:44] It depends on how the pool was initially started out. I think that's the key here.
ERIC [00:25:50] Assume it was started up our way in the last three years of doing it.
JARRED [00:25:53] Yes. Now it gets started up our way. No, unless, like I said, there's other external factors. Why did it rain? Did somebody not do a bicarb rinse after they did an acid wash like these things are very important. That can't be overlooked on that.
ERIC [00:26:08] And that's really what we're talking about in this episode, because, again, we're going to go through the procedure in the next episode 13. This is really more than why this is the philosophy of what we're trying to do. So if there's imperfections, there's preexisting conditions, whether it be from a bad acid wash or they didn't neutralize the bowl and it turned white. Those are things we can't control at Orenda. All right. But they are things that sometimes you can clean up. I shouldn't say sometimes. Usually you can clean up after thirty days. It depends on how deep the acid sat there, how long you might still have a lighter bowl, but by and large, the pool is going to get cleaned up. So I would agree.
JARRED [00:26:43] But I would also say it is I know anybody that spending a lot of money, which don't get me wrong, has pools. Pools aren't cheap, especially in grand pools are not cheap. And when a customer spends that kind of money, they expect perfection. And as a salesperson or the builder, you're trying to give them that perfection. But we have to be real here. Like everything has to be covered with the types of services, the different expectations that can happen and set this job for success from the get go so that, hey, there is a chance for a little bit of haziness or a little bit of modeling, depending on the surface, or the exposure might be a little different because it is not a perfect product like we keep saying, cement cures ugly, we will get it to its best form as we can if it's done the right way. And the. That's what the expectation needs to be.
ERIC [00:27:40] Yeah, so just like we're setting expectations with what our Orenda startup can and cannot do. You listening to this, whether you're a homeowner or a pool builder or plaster applicator need to understand what expectations are for an actual plaster job. When you see a sample, you know those little three inch samples of perfect plaster. Those were done in a perfect condition. Those were done mechanically. Like that was not a hand applied product in the same way that you're going to have it in your pool. And it didn't have weather elements to contend with or contend with. And it was everything was controlled. So, of course, that's going to look better than what your normal pool is going to look like.
JARRED [00:28:18] Well, it may have been hand applied, but it was one person specific job to get the perfect exposure across the whole four inch square. Like, no, that is not real. Guys agree?
ERIC [00:28:30] Yeah, well, I mean, some a lot of the pool is going to look like that. But our objective, like I said, is if we just let the water saturate on our terms, if we pretreat it and we're it's kind of like a slightly overfeeding a person at the the Shoney's buffet before you take them to the nice steakhouse so they don't have eyes bigger than their stomach.
JARRED [00:28:53] Sho-Shonies, now you're really showing where you're from here.
ERIC [00:28:57] I do live in I live in the Carolinas. I don't want to hear about it, OK? My first job interview was at a Shoney's, so that's a fact. But no, I don't regularly eat there. But the point is these all you can eat buffets. We are going to overfeed water on purpose. Not enough to scale, but [00:29:15]if you do scale, don't freak out. It's we call it snowing. It's just a little oversaturation. It's easy to clean up. [6.2s] But what we are going to do is we're going to make sure that that water is carbonating the surface properly, but it's not stealing anything from the surface. That's it. That's that's the whole premise of the startup. It will ignore preexisting conditions. It can be cleaned up later.
JARRED [00:29:38] I'll tell you my experience with that. It was probably my first, maybe second startup I've ever done.
ERIC [00:29:44] At the Shoney's?
JARRED [00:29:46] No.
ERIC [00:29:48] OK, sorry.
JARRED [00:29:49] I was and it was specifically the snowing and I was going out with a new customer here in the Dallas area and I was like, all right, cool, I'm going to do my first startup because don't get me wrong, everybody, I was kind of skeptical on this process at the get go a couple of years ago.
ERIC [00:30:05] We didn't come up with a process. Probably worth noting, this was created from a lot of different minds, like Lupe at Blue Moon Pools and Dave Penton, Dave Rockwell and a lot of other people contributed to this. So this is not one hundred percent our idea. We've evolved it from a lot of people that know more than we do.
JARRED [00:30:23] So I'm going out to do a startup for with a customer first time and I'm like, who made this? I know what I'm doing. I've done this. I've read enough stuff to know how to do this. So I did it. I come back the next day and it is white everywhere. And I'm literally I just start getting anxiety like a little sweaty. My hands are getting a little little wet and I'm like, oh crap. What what just happened? I have no idea what just happened. So I call Eric. I call Harold. I call everybody. I'm like, what's up? So I start brushing the pool. All right. I'm like, the weirdest thing is going on: I brush the surface and it looks perfect. Like like no dust. Exposures perfect, like it looks amazing, but then after about three to five seconds, it gets white again and then I brush it off again. It's like it never goes away. Just brush it off perfect white. And I'm like, what is going on? Well, turns out. It snowed all over that all over that floor, and the plaster itself was extremely happy because it had all the calcium that it wanted, it didn't need to steal anything. The water didn't need to steal anything from the surface and it carbonated and cured and look great. All I did -
ERIC [00:31:49] But it was curing I mean, it was it was your second day. Yeah. But it wasn't pissed off because the water wasn't stealing from it.
JARRED [00:31:54] No, all I did was add acid and within about 30 minutes looked phenomenal.
ERIC [00:32:01] It was gone. Yes. And then that's all you have to do because you just have to lower the pH to re-dissolve calcium carbonate. And and by the way, I bet you set your calcium to, what, three hundred or so? That's what our original parameters were, OK, and when you got there, the calcium was probably, what, 220?
JARRED [00:32:19] I don't what the calcium was,.
ERIC [00:32:20] But it wasn't three hundred.
JARRED [00:32:22] No, but it wasn't it wasn't plaster dust that was the important part.
ERIC [00:32:26] But you know that because you put in enough calcium chloride to get to three hundred and then when you got there, it wasn't three hundred because you were looking at whatever the delta was and you're looking at it on the floor, it carbonated because the was either too high. And by the way, that can happen if you wait too long too, because if it starts etching in the first let's say you wait six inches in the bowl of water, well it's already etching. So the edge of that bowl could be 10, you know, I mean, pulling out twelve point six hydroxide, it could be close to twelve point six. Well, if you just start adding calcium now and the pH is already up, well, guess what's going to happen is too high. All that calcium is just going to fall out of solution. It's not going to go in and stay dissolved, and you're going to have snowing thing. We see that a lot. So you've got to be aware of that. So there's there's nuances onto the exact procedure. Again, we'll cover that in the next episode. But I think we've covered why we do this and to set expectations. Right. Like we're not it's not our job as startup people to rectify preexisting conditions. Not only is it not our job, we can't do it. If we tried. The only thing that startup technicians can do to rectify things (and it's only short term) is a hot start. And we don't recommend that because it's too early and it's too aggressive. Instead, start it up properly, cook that steak, cure that plaster the right way, and after thirty days, do your low ALK treatment, do your acid treatment and that can clean off the surface and you'll have long term success. That's really what we wanted to cover in this episode. Did I miss anything, Jared?
JARRED [00:34:04] Nope, I think it's just another one of those. If you want to know more on what we're touching about on hot starts, acid bass, things like that. Visit our website. Go to our blogs. We have all kinds of information that touch specifically on those items. And you'll have a better understanding as to why we disagree with those in further detail.
ERIC [00:34:23] Right. But we don't disagree with the science behind a lot of this stuff. What we disagree with is timing and sequencing, because we found that the science we've proven to be true all that, all the data and the research, our startup proves that it's right. But how you go about doing that, we put more urgency on overfeeding before it goes in the pool, not waiting a day or so. That being said, like Jared said, go to blog, dot Orenda, tech dot com. And in there there's a bunch of articles. We have a whole video series on startup. All this information is available online. It's also available in the app. So if you go into the article section type, the words start in the search bar, you'll see a whole bunch of stuff there, too. So all this is accessible for you. Thank you for listening. We are Eric and Jared from Orenda. And this is Episode 12 of The Rule Your Pool podcast. We'll see you next week on Episode thirteen, where we go through the procedure. Thanks for your time.