Eric talks about SC-1000 and why it reduces free chlorine on its initial purge dose, and what you can do about it. The episode also covers the comparison between chelating agents like SC-1000 and sequestering agents.
00:00 - Introduction
01:12 - Why SC-1000 reduces free chlorine
02:58 - How to use SC-1000 without zeroing out free chlorine
04:25 - How to chlorinate after SC-1000
05:29 - Sequestering vs. chelating
07:09 - The distinction between metals and minerals
08:06 - Phosphate-based sequestering agents
10:17 - Cold water temperature
11:33 - Use SC-1000 in the spring, not the fall
12:32 - Recap
13:42 - Closing, and new HASA Feedback email, feedback@hasa.com
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116. Chelating vs. sequestering, and chlorination after using SC-1000
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: Happy 4th of July, everybody, and welcome back to the Rule Your Pool podcast. That's right. It is July 4th, independence day 2023. It has been a late start to the summer, weather-wise. Those of you in Southern California, you know what I'm talking about. But everywhere else, it seems pretty hot. I know it's been triple digits in most of the Sunbelt, and I hope all of you listening are having a wonderful season so far.
[00:00:24] I want to address a question that continues to come up and we do have articles about it in our help center, ask.orendatech.com. We also have written about it in our blog. If you go to the website and you just search, or actually the app, and go to the main menu to blogs, search SC-1000. And you will find an article that explains why SC-1000 wipes out free chlorine.
[00:00:47] And I want to explain not only why that happens in this episode. But what you can do about it. You know, how can we make it better? How can we chlorinate after the fact? The other thing I'm going to talk about is we now have the feedback email set up through HASA. It is feedback@hasa.com. That's feedback@hasa.com.
[00:01:09] Let's get into this episode. It will be a short one.
Why SC-1000 reduces free chlorine
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[00:01:12] Eric Knight: I want to read to you a message I have on my screen that's actually a comment on our article how to implement the Orenda program. This is what inspired this episode. She says all of your directions gloss over what to do to add chlorine at the end of using SC-1000. Do you need to shock the pool? Or do you naturally just up the chlorine in your chlorinator? How many days does it take for a 10,000 gallon pool to take chlorine again? I only put in 16 ounces. The scale is disappearing on my spillway so I can see it's clearly working. Please, let me know what I should be doing after day three. I still have no chlorine readings on my test kit. Thank you.
[00:02:13] Amen. We don't mean to gloss over it. I guess it should be more clear. And that's part of the reason I'm doing this podcast.
[00:02:19] Any of you who have ever used SC-1000, you know that the initial dose will zero out your chlorine. We say this openly. It is one of the downsides to the product. Chlorine doesn't know what SC-1000 is. And it tries to oxidize it. And since it can't oxidize it, it loses. And there's not much you can do about that except slow down how fast you dose it. Which is why we advise everybody to break up the purge dose over multiple visits, into smaller doses.
[00:02:51] And of course the exception to that is startup. If you're doing a startup, you would add it all as you're filling the pool.
How to use SC-1000 without zeroing out chlorine
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[00:02:58] Eric Knight: Now, If you were to just add a purge dose of SC-1000 in the middle of the summer, it may take four or five days to get a chlorine reading. Be prepared for that. So let's say you want to purge mid-season. It's July right now. It's hot. You can't afford to zero out your chlorine for several days. How do you do it?
[00:03:20] Well, there's two things. Number one, we're going to break up the purge dose. We're not going to do 32 ounces per 10,000 gallons all at once. We're going to do it over several visits or several days. Number two, give it something to bind to to activate it quickly. I recommend a pound or so of calcium chloride in a bucket. Doesn't take a lot. Just get some heat and get SC-1000 working. Get that bucket cleared, put it in. The key is you need SC-1000 to have something to do.
[00:03:52] If you put SC-1000 in the water on its own, the first thing that's going to happen is chlorine will attack it and lose. You don't want that. That's going to zero out your chlorine.
[00:04:02] The big question that we get is for how long? How long will it take until I can hold chlorine again? The answer to that is as soon as SC-1000 has done its job. That's it. Because when SC-1000 binds to iron, for instance, chlorine ignores it. It's now neutrally charged, it doesn't care. That's the goal.
How to chlorinate after SC-1000
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[00:04:25] Eric Knight: So how can we get SC-1000 to work faster so that we minimize the downtime of chlorine? And then how do you chlorinate after? What do we do? Do we shock? Do we just add it? A lot of people would think I need to shock. No, it's really a timing and temperature thing. Because again, it's just a matter of is SC-1000 activating and finding something to bind to, or not?
[00:04:48] So if it is the next day, it's not going to do you any good to shock because it's just going to get zeroed out again. You might want to use a normal amount of chlorine and hand feed it for temporary swimming or something. But generally what you want to do is you want to help SC-1000 get to work. You want to give it something to bind to, and then once it activates, it can move and grab onto what it really needs to do.
[00:05:10] It's not about how much chlorine you add or how fast. It's about the time after using SC-1000 so that SC-1000 can activate. Temperature will impact this. The colder the water, the longer it takes. And of course the amount you dosed. If it's just a weekly dose, you're not really going to notice it.
Sequestering vs. Chelating
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[00:05:29] Eric Knight: When you compare SC-1000 to a sequestering agent, you have different methods of doing a very similar thing. A sequestering agent, I view it as sort of a metal magnet. It can pull a whole bunch of metals or minerals to it. And it makes a bigger molecule. And by binding to the electrons of a metal, that metal, let's say it's iron or copper, cannot be oxidized. Which means it's not going to stain. It's not going to come out of solution, and that's good.
[00:05:57] A chelant will do the same thing, except it doesn't pull a whole bunch of metals and minerals into a larger clump. It individually seeks out, ion by ion, and binds to individual metals. So it keeps them separate.
[00:06:11] If you're going to be removing metals, you need a metal removing filter of some kind. A sequestering agent can help with this because it makes it a bigger molecule. That's what sequestering agents are really good at. They can help you remove metals quickly if you have the filtering mechanism. Maybe that's adding some sort of a filter enhancer, like fibers into a sand filter, or using a DE filter, or something like that. Then you need to clean out the filter afterward. You can also get individual metal removing products. They exist on the market. You can put them in your strainer basket and they work pretty well.
[00:06:45] Ideally when you're filling the pool initially, especially if you're on well water and you know you have metals, use a pre-filter. Filter the metals out before they get in there. That's the easiest way to keep them out. But if metals are in your tap water, they're going to be introduced every time you add tap water.
[00:07:01] If you don't have a huge amount of metals and you just want to make sure that they don't cause a problem, that's where SC-1000 can really help you.
The distinction between metals and minerals
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[00:07:09] Eric Knight: Now I use the word metals and minerals differently. I'm going to make the distinction here that metals can be oxidized. Iron, copper, manganese, stuff like that. Minerals are alkali earth metals that don't get oxidized. I'm thinking calcium and magnesium. They get carbonated. Or they bind to another anion like sulfate or silica or phosphate. But they don't get oxidized. You don't oxidize calcium.
[00:07:37] A sequestering agent is going to bind to both, and so will a chelating agent like SC-1000. So as a recap, chelation is individually binding metals and minerals ion by ion and keeping them separate and holding on real tight. Sequestering is attracting metals to it and making a bigger clump, which does make it easier to remove. SC-1000 is not a metal magnet. It is not a sequestering agent. It is a chelating agent.
Phosphate-based sequestering agents
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[00:08:06] Eric Knight: The positives of a sequestering agent are they work really fast, they are very good for removing metals if you have the filter like we talked about, and they're affordable. You can get a whole bunch of different brands of them. There's no doubt. But they will eventually degrade in sunlight; most of them could be oxidized by chlorine over time; and most of them are phosphate-based. Which means when you put PR-10,000 phosphate remover in the water, it's going to wipe out that sequestering agent.
[00:08:36] This can confuse customers, and they'll say, Hey, I've got 2000 parts per billion phosphates. And they use a bunch of PR-10,000, it clouds up like crazy. And they come back and they, they test it after it clears and it's at 1800. Hardly went down at all. This actually does happen sometimes. And that is because you're probably using a sequestering agent that is a phosphate compound. But It's not showing up on a test kit that's measuring orthophosphates.
[00:09:03] Orthophosphates are the building blocks of phosphate compounds. Whether it's a chain or a ring, metaphosphate, polyphosphate, I'm not going to get into it. We have a different episode about that and we have all of this documented in our blog.
[00:09:16] You may have more phosphates than you think. And sequestering agents are the biggest source of phosphates outside of tap water itself. So if you are using one, be aware, you're going to have phosphates in that pool. If you put PR-10,000 in a pool that has a sequestering agent that's binding up a bunch of metals, those metals are going to go free. One of the questions we get often is, does PR-10,000 have iron in it? Why is it causing me to have iron stains or brown stains or, or copper or whatever? No. All it did was wipe out the sequestering agent. And then the metals went free and they got oxidized, and you now have a stain.
[00:09:51] That's why it's so important that if you're going to use a sequestering agent, you need the metal filter to capture what it's actually holding onto to get it out of the pool. If you use those in conjunction, there's a place for a sequestering agent. It's actually a really good product. Just understand the baggage left behind is going to be phosphates.
[00:10:09] SC-1000 is more of the long game. Because it's not going to be oxidized by chlorine and it contains no phosphates.
Cold water temperature
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[00:10:17] Eric Knight: A downside to both sequestering agents and SC-1000 is they don't work well in cold water. They'll hold on in cold water, but they won't really activate. And we don't know exactly what temperature this is, but to be safe, just assume that it's not going to work very well or very fast below about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, or 18.3 Celsius. It's the same thing.
[00:10:42] If it's colder than that, sequestering agents of any kind and SC-1000, they're just not going to activate very well. If they do, it's going to be very slow. And the colder you get, the more dormant the product goes. So you really want heat. You want that water to be warmer. Which is why if I'm going to be adding SC-1000 purge dose in the spring time on a winterized pool, I'm going to be grabbing a bucket of water, dissolving calcium chloride, which gets really hot when you dissolve it, and I'm going to put my SC-1000 in there. I'm going to chelate that calcium, get it hot, get it cleared, and then I'm going to add that to the pool. That is how you should add SC-1000 in the spring.
[00:11:22] You don't have to chlorinate yet because your pool's not quite warm enough to really have problems yet. We do talk about this in our procedure, but we still get the questions anyway. So I figured I'd just mention it.
Use SC-1000 in the spring, not the fall
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[00:11:33] Eric Knight: Which brings me to another topic of SC-1000 and other sequestering agents. A lot of people will close their pool and they will add these products in the fall. And the temperature is already below 65. It doesn't do anything. You're wasting money. We don't recommend adding it in the fall. You should be adding it in the spring in the early 60's and rising. The whole idea is you get it in the pool when it's about that temperature, or warmer, and rising. That was the best time to purge.
[00:12:01] Most people don't actually have to maintain because once you have it in, it stays in. So unless you're on well water and you're constantly introducing new metals, you don't really need to do the weekly maintenance of SC-1000. Now that may not be the case for you. Maybe you're on well water. Maybe you do have a ton of iron in your tap. If that's the case, three ounces per 10,000 gallons a week makes sense.
[00:12:23] You're not going to really see a chlorine reduction with the maintenance dose. You will absolutely see it with the purge dose.
Recap
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[00:12:32] Eric Knight: So let me recap all of this. SC-1000 is meant to prevent stains and scale from happening. It buys you grace, certainly on the LSI. You could still have scale, it's just a lot less likely. You could still have flakes in a salt water pool if your alkalinity is too high, because your pH ceiling is too high. I think we beat that dead horse enough on this podcast.
[00:12:53] As I like to say, if you do your part, SC-1000 will do its part. Balance your LSI. Take care of metals if they're in there and try to remove them. That's part of our philosophy. Orenda wants to take things out of your pool. Not put more things in.
[00:13:09] SC-1000 is an insurance policy. Purge once a year in the spring, when the water's warming up. Give it plenty of time to go to work. Chlorinate a few days later or a week later because the water temperature's not quite warm enough yet to cause a problem, but it's warm enough that SC-1000 can start to activate. Especially if you add it with calcium chloride dissolving with all that heat.
[00:13:34] The name of the game is to hold chlorine after using SC-1000 is to get SC-1000 to work as fast as possible.
Closing, and HASA feedback email
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[00:13:42] Eric Knight: I hope this episode answers your questions about how to use SC-1000 and how to chlorinate afterward. If not, shoot me an email, podcast@orendatech.com. I'm happy to point you in the right direction. But check our help center, we do have it written down there. Ask.orendatech.com. Thank you so much for your feedback and the text messages. It's great.
[00:14:00] We've got a lot of episodes coming down the chute, but we have a lot of travel as well. So I'm going to try my best to get one out every week in July, but no promises.
[00:14:08] And one more thing. I said it at the beginning. The email that I talked about, I don't know, four or five episodes ago has been created. It is feedback@hasa.com. So, if you have any questions about HASA or you're noticing any issues that we should be aware of, please email that feedback@hasa.com. That's HASA.com. Just tell us how it is. That's what we need to hear. I can't promise there will be dialogue with every single person that writes in, but I can promise I will read every single one.
[00:14:40] Anyway, this has been the Rule Your Pool podcast episode 116. I'm your host Eric Knight. Thank you so much for being with us and for continuing to listen. Happy fourth!