Jared Stanley, a pool service pro in Florida, joins the show to discuss his field experiments with forcing calcium out of solution using soda ash as a means of reducing calcium hardness. How do his results compare to the scientific research?
[00:00] - Intro
[03:39] - Evaporation and the wet/dry effect
[09:16] - How much is a high calcium level?
[11:14] - Intentionally forcing calcium out of solution
[14:14] - Trial and error
[21:54] - Using a pH probe
[25:45] - What does this process look like?
[31:05] - Alkalinity drops too. Why?
[36:41] - What the research says
[43:50] - Closing
201. How to Floc Calcium using Soda Ash (w/ Jared Stanley)
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Eric Knight: What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Rule Your Pool podcast. We are in a new century of episodes now that we have passed episode 200. Believe it or not, we are off to a great start because we have another guest today also named Jared. Now, just, uh, as, as luck would have it, his name happens to be Jared.
If I was choosing to have Jared on two successive episodes, I'm sure the podcast viewership would totally collapse. But this is a different Jared, and I'm excited to have him on here. Jared Stanley He is with Stanley Pool Service. Welcome to the Rule Your Pool podcast. Thanks for being a listener, and thank you for reaching out with this awesome topic to discuss today.
Jared Stanley: Sure, glad to be here. Thanks for having me
Eric Knight: All right, so what we're going to talk about today is something that I had heard many, many years ago when I was still writing blogs with Orenda, and I was learning about soda ash. Now, you got to remember, I came from the commercial pool space. Soda ash was very common in a commercial pool pump room, and it works pretty well there because you have acid automation in most of these pools, and you have a aquatics director who's there every day.
And so you don't have this rush of time like we do in the residential swimming pool business, where You only have a few minutes to change chemistry at a backyard pool. You have to do all these other things, and then you have to get on the road and get to the next pool.
Well, soda ash, if you just add it too quickly, any pro will tell you it clouds up your water. But what if you flip that on its head? What if your objective is to cloud the water because you don't have the luxury of being able to drain? So this is especially true in the desert areas, and I got to give credit to Que Hales from OnBalance, who has really sort of pioneered this.
And in Tucson, Arizona, where he is, they don't have the ability to drain and dilute as often as they would like. So they can intentionally knock calcium out of solution with soda ash. But I've never really had another customer take it to the next level to actually experiment with this, document the results, and dial in a procedure until Jared Stanley.
And ironically enough, Jared, you are in Jacksonville, Florida. You get plenty of rain, and dilution is not a problem. So before getting into the intro and finishing this, why did you do this? Why did you want to learn how to knock out calcium intentionally?
Jared Stanley: We've had a lot of swimming pools have that wet/dry calcium carbonate effect on tiles, grottos, scale formation. They're constantly getting scale in the salt cells. The, uh, the water's hard. They're out in an area where they have a total hardness of 230, 300 parts per million. heck, I find out, uh, even with the hardness of just 120 out the tap, with the amount of evaporation and the, and the temperature changes in Florida might be similar or way far different from other areas around the country where it gets cold and you evaporate and you're sticking that 120 to, to 300 part per million hard water back in your pool to fill it back up.
So it takes, like, one year or four years to accumulate those levels, um, simply draining the pool and replacing water not only voids that yearly affidavit, uh, water credit form you fill out with the county that you get, I think, once a year. Um, but you're also going through the madness of draining a pool, swimming, diving, popping a main drain plug, then filling it back up with the same hard water.
Um, so it's been thought of before, but it's something that I've implemented and been a lot more intentional. Like you said, intentionally milking the pool up been a way to, uh, especially using flocculent, drop calcium out of the pool without having to drain a pool and risk popping the shell out of the ground.
Eric Knight: Man, I'm excited to talk about this. We're going to get into the science. This is episode 201 of the Rule Your Pool podcast. Let's go.
[00:03:39] Evaporation and the Wet/Dry Effect
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Eric Knight: Okay, Jared, I'm going to let you take the lead on this. you explained that you're starting to see scale even in Florida, where it rains pretty frequently throughout the year, and the evaporation is less than that of the Arizona desert, not because it's not hotter, but because it's more humid.
So evaporation is a function of vapor pressure differential, temperature differential, things like that. So you're not evaporating as much, but you're still evaporating a lot. And if your tap water, like you said, could be over 100, maybe even over 200 calcium hardness, you're replacing it. But you also have rain, which has zero calcium hardness.
So when you called me and you were telling me, "Hey, I've been intentionally knocking calcium out. Here's what I found." A, very few people have ever called me with documentation of a long-term experiment like this, and that got my attention, and B, I was shocked to hear that you were having to do this in Florida.
So with that said, talk to me, and then I want to get into the science because you got my, uh, research brain triggered on, and I started doing a lot of homework, and I found out a lot of numbers and values that, uh, we're going to explain on this show. So go ahead. Tell the audience, why'd you reach out? What have you been doing?
Jared Stanley: Yeah, so, you know, we're out of Jacksonville, Florida, and we have up to 500 maintenance accounts. We do building, we do construction, we do remodels, renovations, startups, and that's another reason why I've reached out to you in the past. Is we've taken startups very seriously.
We've learned the, uh, I've had to learn the LSI and, and, and intentionally use the Orenda startup procedure. That's changed the, the name of the game, especially for these darker finishes. So learning that LSI has been a beautiful thing over the course of the last four years.
Eric Knight: Thank you
Jared Stanley: and it, it's been, it's been amazing, and I've been the first one to tell you. So finding out all of this stuff was, I had a maintenance accounts, uh, that would complain. We keep getting this calcium carbonate wet/dry effect on our, on our grotto, our spillway, the most highest temperature places throughout the pool where they're just stubborn. And even DIY homeowners would call in saying, "What am, what am I doing wrong? What should I be doing?" Um, and a year later, hundreds and hundreds of dollars later, buying the s- the Scale Gone, superficial chemicals, taking all that stuff off the walls. Yeah, it gets, it gets it off the wall for two or three weeks, but you didn't never really fix the root cause of what's causing that.
Um, it's having a high calcium in, in a lot of cases, and especially in a salt pool where you got a high alkalinity in some cases, and 100% of the time having a high pH. The things I find in most of these pools, they have a high pH, high temperature places, high alkalinity, and then you got a high calcium.
Eric Knight: Well, all all of these raise the LSI. So yes, we have an LSI, but it's important to distinguish for the audience, there is a difference between an LSI violation and the wet-dry effect that Jared's referring to. And here's the main difference. If you have a scale line at or below the waterline, that's most likely an LSI violation, right?
You have scale coming out of solution. But water, as we know, wicks up and down that, um, tile line. So when you have a scale line depositing above the waterline or like on a spillway that doesn't run all the time or something like that, a lot of times there's oils in the water that stick to the tile, which change the friction on there, so it keeps water on there, and it, it instead of going right back into the pool like a really slick tile surface, it stays there longer, long enough to evaporate enough that it starts leaving behind its minerals.
So we have seen pools that are perfectly LSI balanced that still have the wet-dry effect above the waterline, not because the LSI is out of balance, but because there's enough time that that balanced water evaporates. And as water leaves, the concentration of the calcium and the alkalinity go up, therefore the LSI goes up.
By no fault of your own, it's just the, the, the reality of the physics involved. Water leaves, LSI goes up right there on that tile line above the waterline. So I think you're talking about both here. All those factors of course raise the LSI, but when you have the wet-dry effect, that is above the waterline.
Am I hearing you correctly?
Jared Stanley: absolutely. 100%.
Eric Knight: Okay, let's continue
Jared Stanley: Yeah, and the, and the two differences between water balance and using the LSI more towards how are we going to go about getting rid of the calcium? but everything you said, uh, uh, as far as the cementitious, uh, grout, the oils, there's oils on the, the, the line that's causing more of a friction, like you said, keeping scale where it can catch and adhere to it, and then it just builds on itself over time. Which some of those oils can be treated with the enzymes, um, and that could help in some
Eric Knight: Harold used to call this the peanut butter and jelly effect, where you'd get scale and oils and scale and oils, and it would just kind of layer on. And, uh, it's a big problem in commercial pools, especially outdoor commercial pools. And we had a lot of accounts that would put the enzymes in, and it would take the oils off, and suddenly their scale would go away.
It's like, well, you didn't actually have a scale LSI problem. You just had an evaporation problem that just got caked in with more oils. And so anyway, I don't mean to distract you. So you're in Florida. You have high calcium hardness.
[00:09:16] How much is a High calcium level?
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Eric Knight: First of all, what do you consider a high calcium hardness level?
Jared Stanley: I think, well, between me and you, we know high calcium it just is totally dictated, uh, uh, as far as the LSI goes. But for me, a high calcium would be five hundred, six hundred, in some cases eight hundred,
Eric Knight: And you're, and you're, seeing values get over that in your market?
Jared Stanley: I'm seeing values get past six hundred. It's not common, and usually it's, caught before it gets that high,
Eric Knight: Right
Jared Stanley: especially with the, the, the rain we get in Florida and the, the water loss and, and splash out, splash, you know. Um, I, I, I don't really ever see a twelve hundred or a thousand. I'm seeing five hundreds and six hundreds. And then with, with the evaporation, when that weather cools off, that's when you're seeing it.
Eric Knight: Right.
Jared Stanley: seeing a lot of that
Eric Knight: And so you're seeing this on-- I mean, you have 500 accounts. How many pools are we talking per year are you having this issue where you're like, "Oh, our calcium's too high. We need to knock it down"?
Jared Stanley: Well, that's part of, um, you know, the technician needs to identify it, and that's part of A lot of our account-- Most of our accounts don't have it, but it happens, and it's just a part of the natural experience of owning a swimming pool. Most people that I get call in are not our maintenance.
They call in because they have had a relationship for thirty-plus years with, with my family, and they'll call in saying, "Ah, the stubborn scale stain is, is It came back again." So usually what it is. But I'll tell you what, some ... for somebody that doesn't have maintenance or is DI-DIY, a lot of these people that get brand-new pools five years ago, it's just kinda grown on 'em, where it's just a part of the experience now.
And so it just worsens, and they get used to it.
Eric Knight: Mhm.
Jared Stanley: Um, they don't do anything about it. It ... Or they've done too much. They've dropped $400 a year on sequestering chemicals, Scale Gone stuff, and they've ran that race.
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Jared Stanley: So people kind of just accept it until it's too late, and they've, they've, they've thought about it enough times to call in and have it fixed.
[00:11:14] Intentionally Forcing Calcium out of Solution
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Eric Knight: So anyways, you know, you're in Florida. Dilution is usually the most affordable way, certainly to get rid of cyanuric acid. I w- I wish this method got rid of cyanuric acid. That'd be wonderful. But we do know that you can actually precipitate calcium hardness out of your water. So you've been doing some experiments.
You've been doing this on a lot of pools. You've been calling me the past several months. Even last year, you told me you were starting to get into this. What have you found? And then what I want to do is I want to go through what I have found research-wise, theoretically, and we're going to contrast that or hopefully align with what you're finding in the field.
So let's see how close the theory matches the reality.
Jared Stanley: Yes. So I've done this up to ten times over the last six, seven months, and I've come up with two examples that I feel like are a lot more teachable, and it makes sense of that of everything I've experienced. It's, um, these two situations where we're, we're using soda ash. I call it the soda ash calcium floc procedure.
It's been thought of before, but maybe it was messy in the past, and people just don't want to run with it because it's just a messy situation. But you spike the pH, use soda ash, and you milk that cloud up, I'm talking, whole milk, it's all throughout the pool. We're going to floc that within forty minutes of having it milked out. And then we're shutting the pumps off, we're taking the cartridge out three hours. We're setting a run time for three hours for the floc to go to work, two to three hours, and then two days, for two days until the customer calls up till they can see their main drains. When you go out and you're, you're vacuuming all that calcium that was precipitated, and precipitated because it...
You, you... What you did was you formed a scale cloud with all the sodium carbonate, soda ash that you put in the pool. You formed this huge scale cloud, and then you flocked it with two bottles of Super Floc. And you added weight to it, and you added weight to that calcium scale down to the floor, and you vacuumed the waste out. And the numbers that you come up with afterwards can be predicted, uh, by simply using the LSI calculator.
And so two examples I have right now were calcium levels at 505, and a calcium of 320. And you want to take into account the pH. Getting to those numbers and predicting how much calcium am I going to lose at the end of this operation. You can come up with a pretty rough number depending on where the LSI and the Orenda app is what I use to, to find
Eric Knight: you also need to know the pool volume too. You need to know your starting. You need to know like a lot of values for this to work. But yeah, keep going. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I love that you're documenting this
Jared Stanley: you know, if it's 16,000, you better know, don't be 3,000 gallons off. That's, that, you're 15% off the dose. You're 15% off of predicting the calcium. So you want to know that, whether you measure it by square footage, cubic volume, and, or the length times width, and the, the shallow end, the deep end. Using the Orenda volume estimators has, has been a very helpful tool. And I, I usually use that, and I come up with the right numbers on my dosages.
And that's, that's all, and that's all throughout our maintenance with Pool Brain and everything too. But, um, but yeah. This process has worked, and I've been able to predict where the calcium's going to go, how I get there is something I want to explain. It's,
Eric Knight: please do
Jared Stanley: a lot. It's kind of a lot, but
Eric Knight: Hey, listen, our audience is not here for the social calls. They are here to learn. I, I've been told this by many listeners, including yourself. People come here to learn hardcore chemistry that's going to help them in the field. So unload, man. There's nothing to hold back here.
[00:14:44] Trial and Error
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Jared Stanley: So I came up with two things. So where in the past I thought I could come up with my soda ash dose, and what I'm finding out is I'm wrong about that. And so for instance, if I have a pool that's a 7.7 pH, and I want to take it up to 9.2. So at a 9.2 pH with this temperature, in order to get that soda ash dose, I would have had to go down on calcium to find out how much calcium I'm going to, I'm going to lose at that pH.
And that's where I think I was wrong, because whenever I went up to 8.8 and 8.9, it was taking me having to go down on the right side of my Orenda calculator all the way down to like 90 ppm. Which didn't make sense to me. And so when the procedure got finished, I really went from 505 ppm calcium down to 300.
Eric Knight: Oh, so at the pH, it changed the soda ash dose, which radically changed how much calcium you were taking out, right?
Jared Stanley: Absolutely. So I was judging how much calcium I was going to have out at, at LSI equilibrium at 8.8. When really I should have just anticipated the fall. The equilibrium of the pH where it was going to be at 8.4 back when air was off-gassing back into the pool. And then whatever calcium you get at that pH, the difference between that calcium and the calcium that I had way before, as long as you're at 0.00 at 8.4, that's the calcium you're more than likely going to end up with, give or take 30 ppm.
Eric Knight: That aligns perfectly with the research. So let me just kind of rephrase that for the audience, because he's saying a lot of things without like parts per millions and pH after it. So what he's saying, if, and correct me where I'm wrong here, Jared. Is depending on the pH where you start is going to determine your soda ash dose.
And if you have an already high pH, you're going to get a much smaller soda ash dose than you would if your pH was low, like 7.4. The, the calculator's going to tell you, "Hey, you need a lot more soda ash to do what you're trying to do." Well, the amount of calcium you lose is directly proportional to wherever that spiked LSI is after you put the soda ash in, and it's going to start shedding calcium, if you could see on video, my hand's going down, until you get back to 0.00 LSI.
So if you spike the pH super high and you get that LSI way high, what is the water trying to do? It's trying to return to its natural state. Two episodes ago, right? That's what water's trying to do. So it's going to start shedding calcium until it gets LSI balanced, and then it stops. Is that what you're saying?
Jared Stanley: That's what I've found. And, and the dose, so I was coming out with these monster doses, like 18 pounds, 16 pounds of soda ash. But what I'm finding out is as long as you get up to a higher pH, the water's going to do what it wants to do. It's going to, it's going to return to its equilibrium it needs to be at 8.4 back when it goes back to the pH ceiling. So you're going to give, think that giving soda ash, you want to get the pH up to 8.8, 9.0 and as long as you can do that, you can calculate the amount of soda ash
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Jared Stanley: take it
Eric Knight: Well, you've said 8.4 twice. Is that where your pH ceiling is on the calculator? Or,
Jared Stanley: Yeah
Eric Knight: you must have a lot of alkalinity, or does it become 8.4 when you add the soda ash?
Jared Stanley: So it was eight point four walking up to it, and that this is my first example. So the pH was 8.4, alkalinity was 139.
Eric Knight: Well there you go, Okay. Keep going. Sorry
Jared Stanley: Calcium was 550, TDS was 3700 in a salt pool. You're walking up to a high pH because it's got a salt cell on it. The CYA was 100. So having that alkalinity at 139, ceiling's going to be somewhere around 8.4 - 8.5.
Eric Knight: That's-- Okay, that's my question, because I was like, well, if you're, you know, on a salt pool, for the listeners, what we generally try to do is keep the alkalinity down in the sixties so that our pH ceiling is below 8.1. And the reason for that is the turbulence in the salt cell raises the pH. And so if you can limit how high the pH goes, obviously it's, it's good to limit the high pH, but it's also very important to limit how high the pH goes because of stabilizer. The higher your pH goes, the more chlorine disassociates from CYA. So it doesn't matter if you have a ton of chlorine, it doesn't matter if you have a ton of CYA, they don't stick together as well at higher pHs.
So there's a lot of incentives to keep your alkalinity lower in a hypochlorite, meaning liquid chlorine or cal hypo, and a saltwater pool to keep that pH down using physics. So when you said 8.4, Jared, it makes sense now you have 139 alkalinity. So how-- First of all, how did the alkalinity get that high? Was this a DIY customer that called in for help?
Jared Stanley: Alkalinity levels in the tap water, Eric, were roughly 90 ppm.
And
Eric Knight: Oh ok
Jared Stanley: The same way that they accumulated calcium, I'm going to say that they accumulated an alkalinity. And, and they did have a service. This wasn't one of our maintenance customers, but they did have a service guy out there.
He may have been, uh, splashing some, um, uh, liquid chlorine in there along with the tap water that had a higher alkalinity level. But yeah, at 8.4 dosing, it, it... what I found was that, uh, dosing that pool and trying to find a soda ash dose to make that calcium to predict it, uh, and force a certain calcium level, wasn't getting a high enough dose of soda ash to go from 8.4 to an 8.8 or 9.2. It was like three pounds. And it... I found out it wasn't really doing anything.
Eric Knight: Right
Jared Stanley: But I... So I overloaded the pool, went up to 9.4, so I'm not crossing my fingers. I'm going to get this calcium married. Like, I'm going to have this calcium for life. I'm going to have this calcium fall out above 8.2 - 8.3.
But if I take it up to 9.2, no matter what, I'm going to get a lot of this calcium out of the pool, and that was originally my plan. Like, if I'm going to do anything, even if I
Eric Knight: Yeah, go big or go home, right?
Jared Stanley: if I drop all of it out, I can fix it when I come back.
Eric Knight: Right
Jared Stanley: So that was... want to find out how to get the calcium out.
So, um, but the dose from 7.8 to 9.2, it's going to be a heavier soda ash dose. But you... where I was wrong before is you can't predict where your calcium's going to be just based off of the soda ash dose or, or LSI's equilibrium at 9.2, or LSI's equilibrium at 9.0 with that calcium to fit that pH is
Eric Knight: Yeah, it's in- it's interesting you're saying that because that is half true, and it's 100% true in the circumstance that you're in. But I'm going to explain through the research why it's only half true, it, at least as the theory goes. But, uh, what he-- To be clear, he said you cannot predict how much calcium you're going to drop out based on where the pH and the soda ash dose is.
Well, that's true if you don't actually know the ratio, which we're going to go through. He was getting confused because he had a different pH when he arrived. One of the pools had a lower pH versus the one with the higher pH, which of course changes your soda ash dose. But in both of these cases, and you said, I wish we were recording.
We were talking before while we were trying to get our microphones working. Um, in both of these cases, the Orenda calculator, the Chemi-culator, was pretty much dead on exactly with the soda ash dose that you needed. Is that correct?
[00:21:54] Using a pH Probe
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Jared Stanley: That is absolutely correct. I ha- and I have my pH probe. But very accurate, and I really dosed that pool the, exactly what the dose told me on the Orenda calculator. But yeah, it was very accurate. By the time I went back out there, or the, about 40 minutes after doing that on the first trip, when I tested the pH, it had already skyrocketed up to 8.7 and it was climbing.
Eric Knight: Ja
Jared Stanley: And by the time I was ready to go walk back to my truck, it capped out. It capped out up to 9.0, 8.7, somewhere in that range.
Eric Knight: What kind of probe are you using?
Jared Stanley: Uh, it's like one of those $40 ones you get off of Amazon, but they, they work pretty well,
Eric Knight: man.
Jared Stanley: probes.
Eric Knight: At some point you're
Jared Stanley: I need to st- I need to get the LaMotte
Eric Knight: I was going to say, dude, get, get the LaMotte 1766. That's what I use. That thing is awesome. It also does temperature. It does-- You can separate-- You can, like, select salinity versus TDS. It does pH very accurately, so that's what I use. But, you know, to me, actually my, my pr-preferential test kit setup that I've had for a long time, uh, but I can't fly with it.
I use a Taylor kit for most things, and then I use that 1766, and with those two things, I can get the full LSI readout. But for the pros listening out here, it's really good for you to invest in a probe. Um, and the reason why is because phenol red, for instance, on pH, it stops at eight, and I'm slightly colorblind. My dad's completely colorblind.
Like, he cannot tell pinks and greens and stuff. It's just like brown to him. So he can't use a Taylor kit, and I think there's a lot of people that don't realize how colorblind they might be. And especially over time, those vials can start to get, uh, a little bit dirty and, and whatever else. But the pH probe is where it's at. Because it'll tell you exactly where that pH is, and that's how you can get those readings over eight.
So if you're ever going to do this procedure, you really do need a probe. You need to know what that pH is actually getting up to. And, and that's how we knew the pH ceiling worked so well. If you go, if you go back several episodes, um, uh, prior to the, the rebirth of this show, I had that pool in my backyard.
And Jared, I know we talked about this. Um,
Jared Stanley: Ja
Eric Knight: I winterized, I set my pH ceiling to 8.05. And when it froze in January or February that, that same winter, I hadn't touched the pool since October 30th. The pH ceiling, when I-- I actually took a hammer to crack through the ice, which was total overkill because it was like my, as thick as my fingernail, so I could have just broke through the ice, but it looked cool.
So I get this sample, I take it inside, I warm it up. And thanks to the probe, the pH was exactly 8.05. So I know that physics-- Like, physics will never fail you. It, it doesn't quit. Now, if something gets in there that changes the equilibrium, that's one thing. But generally speaking, physics is just the law.
It's the law of the land. It's the law of life. And so if you align yourself with that, you want to be able to measure it because that's the truth. Like, that's the hard truth. That's what we know to be true. Everything else is subjective of, well, how accurate is your test? Um, did you calibrate it recently? What else is added? What's in the tap water?
So I, I went on a little tangent there, but what I'm trying to say here is, listeners, this procedure, especially if you are in Arizona or Southern California or a dry climate like Vegas or St. George, Utah, or Salt Lake, pay very close attention to this. With water restrictions, and they're only going to get worse, especially in the American Southwest, this procedure is extremely viable.
Now, we did have a, a gentleman on, uh, Matt, that does reverse osmosis filtration, which is awesome as well. This is a lot more affordable, but it also doesn't get rid of CYA. So like if you're trying to get rid of salinity, CYA, TDS, RO is your move. But this is something you can do. You can take ownership of this and get your calcium down to help you sort of reset your ability to establish an LSI balance.
[00:25:45] What does this process look like?
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Eric Knight: So off of my soapbox, talk to us. What does this process look like? You go into the backyard, what are you bringing with you? How do you do it? What do you see? Go for it.
Jared Stanley: Yeah, and just a sidebar, if, if you guys don't have a probe, I'm very confident in the pH ceiling given the alkalinity. So you can assume wherever your alkalinity is, you can just assume that, hey, you're, you're tapped out at 8.3, especially if you, if you haven't put acid in.
So for the people that want to undergo this procedure, if you're wondering where your pH is, find out where your alkalinity is, if you're not going to do it with a
Eric Knight: on the Orenda calculator. Find it specifically, just look at it. It says pH ceiling. Another way of saying that is future pH. Where is the, the maximum pH that can go? That should be exactly where your pH is unless you were etching plaster or, or someone like Jared threw soda ash in the pool when you weren't looking. So continue.
Jared Stanley: four.
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Jared Stanley: four ways to do that. Yeah.
Eric Knight: Yeah, exactly
Jared Stanley: so just to round this up, what I'm taking out with me, what I'm doing, what this process is, what my chemistry was before, what it is after, I'm going to run that through, you really quick. And so I get out to a pool. It was out in, out in late February, mid-February. The temperature of the water was 65 degrees. pH was 8.4. The alkalinity was 139. The calcium was 550. TDS is 3700. CYA 100. so I got a dose. I put in twelve pounds of soda ash, where I thought the soda ash dose would tell me where my calcium was. When really, putting in soda ash, getting up the pH to 9.0 was really what I, what I needed to, to do.
Um, so I put in the soda ash, stirred it up, brushed it up good, milked it up. And while, while it's milking up, you take the time and go over to the filter, um, and that'll buy you time before you flock it to go to the filter, take the cartridge out, set the timer on the pump to run for three hours. You can get by with two hours, that's fine, but make sure it turns off after that and doesn't have the ability to turn back on.
Eric Knight: Hold on. Time
out, time out. You're taking the cartridge out, but you're resuming circulation after you close it?
Jared Stanley: Yeah, so take the cartridge out, put the lid back on. Now I'm setting my run time for three hours,
Eric Knight: Oh
Jared Stanley: just moments away from putting the, the Super Flock into the water. usually I go in with two quarts of Super Flock, so I'm not fingers crossed
Eric Knight: Is Superflock aluminum chlorohydrate, ACH?
Jared Stanley: I have aluminum, aluminum,
Eric Knight: alum sulfate?
Jared Stanley: aluminum
Eric Knight: Okay. All right.
Jared Stanley: want to say.
Eric Knight: Got it.
Jared Stanley: to say
Eric Knight: I, I mean, it's, it's just a brand. I don't know the brand, but I know that alum comes in two forms, and I'm actually probably going to talk to Rudy about that in the next episode when we get to debate
Jared Stanley: And Rudy does know a little something about floccing CYA out of
Eric Knight: Oh, no.
We're, we're... It's on the list of questions that we're going to w- 'cause we're going to be debating, uh, and I don't know if y'all are listening to this, but we're going to be debating it, I believe, in the next episode. So I'm, I'm looking forward to that. And, uh, he, no, he does know flock. He, he sh- he named his show after flock.
So I don't know much about flocking, so I'm looking forward to learning
Jared Stanley: interested in doing that, and that'll be my next goal is to find out what we can do for that. But,
Eric Knight: Ja
Jared Stanley: um, we go out, we take the cartridge out, run the timer for three hours. It shuts off, doesn't have the ability to come back on for the next day, next two days, three days until that homeowner can see the main drain clearly, and the floc has settled all the calcium carbonate down to the floor.
Now, this is a milky pool you're walking up to. And walk around the edge with two bottles of super floc, dump it in, and you're done. Day one is over. You are done. You've been there for maybe forty-five minutes, fifty minutes. You tested water. You found out how much soda ash you wanted in. You recorded your calcium level, however you do it, Taylor test kit, LaMotte Spin Touch. You get the chemistry, you've... You put soda ash in that pool, and then you do the filter and runtime, and you floc it, and that's your first trip.
Eric Knight: So, so that's,
Jared Stanley: home
Eric Knight: a PoolBrain user, you said. So that would be considered a job in PoolBrain, not a weekly visit. This is a specialty procedure, much like cleaning a filter.
Jared Stanley: this is a specialty procedure I'm thinking about incorporating into our maintenance structure where we have people that go out and do the first leg of that,
Eric Knight: Mm-hmm.
Jared Stanley: we have the homeowner call in. And within three days, if they haven't called in, maybe because they forgot, we would still just go out on the third day. But more than likely, the homeowner's going to be pretty alert to the water being milked up for the first
Eric Knight: Sure.
Jared Stanley: never.
Eric Knight: Well, I bring that up because with what I've been working on with Pool Brain, it should come out hopefully by the end of the year. It's a big project, but it's, it's going to learn. It's going to remember everything. And so it gets smarter every single time you add chemistry every single week, and it's going to learn seasonality.
It's going to learn all sorts of stuff. So if there's a procedure like this, if you document it as a job, it's going to know, well, that was a one-off. Like th- that was an intentional thing that we did. It's not a normal thing. So that, that's why I think it's important to distinguish this is a unique procedure that's not something you would regularly be doing.
Jared Stanley: It's a unique procedure, and what you're doing for the customer doing this. Which trip number two, you're vacuuming to waste, and that's it. And you're going to test chemistry just because you're curious, but, your calcium's going to be down. And so what I got on the next trip out there from the parameters of chemistry I told you before that, the pH went up from the soda ash, but during those two days, it found its natural state of equilibrium of pH and off-gassing.
[00:31:05] Alkalinity drops too. Why?
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Jared Stanley: So it went all the way back down to 8.2, not just 8.4, which was crazy because I found a decrease in alkalinity by 30 ppm.
Eric Knight: That doesn't surprise me. It went to the floor because ca- alkalinity's measured as calcium carbonate too, which we'll get to in just a minute.
Jared Stanley: Well, I found, I found which PKA are, that's a big, that's big terminology, but, um, a PKA, you're, um, you're, you're losing five, nearly five percent at a nine point oh pH of bicarbonate ions turning into CO3. That might be a rough guess, but I'm, I'm thinking that that might be the reason why, because you spiked your pH and a lot of bicarbonates turned into carbonates. So I ended up with a ninety-five, from one forty to ninety-five in the alkalinity. I thought that was interesting.
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Jared Stanley: Um,
Eric Knight: exactly why, actually. That's a very good guess and a very astute observation, so kudos to you.
Jared Stanley: I had to Google it, and, um,
Eric Knight: I love it
Jared Stanley: I've asked you yet, but, um, but that calcium, Eric, it went down from 550 to 320, 320.
Eric Knight: amazing
Jared Stanley: And because 320, whenever I came back down on that 8.2 pH, the LSI was 0.00 at 8.2 pH, and 320 was what I tested the water at, and I adjusted the parameters.
I was or take 0.06 to -0.06. It was a beautiful thing. And then just understanding and, and, and outcome just makes no coincidence. And for that, for a homeowner to, to know that that can happen, it's going to fix my calcium carbonate wet-dry effect on my grottos, my spillways, my salt cell's been scaling over.
I've replaced my third salt cell in five-year conversation. Um, it's a beautiful thing because it, it, it might negate them from accumulating such levels for the next two to three
Eric Knight: Now, are you having flaking issues on your salt cells in your normal maintenance customers?
Jared Stanley: Usually when I see flaking in my salt cells, i- it's going to be in the spa, it's going to be from a high, a high alkalinity. going to be from a high alkalinity 100% of the time. When I see flakes, I test for alkalinity, and that's exactly
Eric Knight: it's usually over 80, I would think
Jared Stanley: Oh, yeah, and, and it's over 80. In a salt pool, it's over 80, where we like to bend chemistries, uh, the chemistry down to 50 and 60, and sometimes we're happy with 40, and we compensate that with the calcium to offset that water's aggression,
Eric Knight: Right.
Jared Stanley: um, using the LSI.
Eric Knight: Yeah, the flakes is one of those questions that when I was with Orenda, we got. It was almost a joke. How many questions about salt flakes are we going to get? You know, obviously they're calcium, they're not salt, but they come from a salt cell. How many questions are we going to get today throughout the summer?
And it was always a lot. Um, in fact, I actually have one case from Aemard in Hawaii. Kudos to you for listening to the show, Aemard and for texting me about this. That I am scratching my head. He's got flakes. They are clearly flakes, and he only has 60 alkalinity. He's doing-- It seems like he's doing everything right, and I am trying to figure out how on earth does he have flakes.
And so I asked him to use a separate test kit. We'll see what he says about that. Maybe, maybe his test kit's off a little bit, but I don't know yet. Uh, at the time of recording, we're trying to troubleshoot that. But every once in a while, you know, tens of thousands of pools that we've touched to fix the flakes through educating pros like yourself, um, maybe hundreds of thousands, I don't even know, uh, whoever's listening to this.
And one in all of those years is defying that logic. So I'm thinking maybe it's a testing issue, I don't know. But, you know, I'm probably going to do an episode about it because it's the first time I've ever seen the pH ceiling and the salt, uh, salt cell calcium flaking issue not align with, with what should happen.
So maybe we're going to find some variable, and that's exciting to me because I always like learning new things. Maybe there's something we've never thought of, and, uh, that kind of gets me going.
Well, uh, is there anything you want to finish with before I get into the research and show the numbers and, and the math that is going to actually validate quite a bit of what you've observed on your own?
Jared Stanley: Yeah. So this process works. You're going to get rid of calcium. Now, the only difference between starting to do it and what I've learned in my conclusion of doing it is, was I thought that simply you could get a soda ash dose going high on the pH and then adjusting the calcium on the right side.
But you're going to go all the way down to like ten because your pH was so high. So it was just not putting the so... Uh, you're not getting your soda ash dose. You're just simply predicting where your calcium's going to
Eric Knight: Right
Jared Stanley: the pH came down to its ceiling. And so predicting that it's, it's a, it's a beautiful thing. At 8.2, we, we ended up getting a 320, and the calculator said just that. But to wrap-- So to wrap that up here, um, in Florida, our water's not as expensive as other places in the country. Where in Florida it's, um, it's just a beneficial way to get rid of somebody's problem that maybe they've accumulated for five years.
And, and however you bill that or run the service call, that's between you and your customers and whatever makes sense. Sometimes you're just doing a, a due diligence of just monitoring, uh, high calcium levels and, the hard way is to drain a pool and fill that pool back up with sixteen thousand gallons and, and in some cases it's 300 dollars.
In Connecticut, it's 2,000 dollars. In Phoenix, they're, they're, uh, on a drought. In California,
Eric Knight: When you could have just bought a couple bottles of floc and, you know,
Jared Stanley: Yeah
Eric Knight: what did you say? 13 pounds of soda ash or something like that, so
Jared Stanley: Yeah, 40, 40 pounds later, or $40 later
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Jared Stanley: with a little bit of guidance
Eric Knight: you better vacuum it though, because if you don't, that calcium carbonate dust on the bottom, just like snowing on a startup or, or even plaster dust, it can adhere and it can cake onto the bottom and you'd, you'd have a, a big issue.
[00:36:41] What the Research Says
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Eric Knight: But, uh, I greatly appreciate you doing this experiment and, and most importantly, documenting it and bringing it to my attention. And thank you for sharing what you've learned and, and most importantly, where you failed. Like, where were we wrong? That's how we learn so much faster. So kudos to you for doing that, Jared.
If you don't mind, I'd like to share my screen. Now, I know the listeners are not going to be able to see this, but the people on Facebook, you know, all seven of them.
Let's see. So what I've done is I've done some research, and it actually comes from a Jon Wojtowicz paper, which is in the Journal of the Swimming Pool and Spa Industry, which is also the basis of the Orenda calculator math, and I have that tab open right here. And it's called A Revised and Updated Saturation Index Equation.
So if you would like to read it, you are welcome to read it. We link to it in the Orenda Help Center, but you can also go to poolhelp.com, which is OnBalance's research site. It's all there. But this is the source. This is where the math comes from. And basically, why, why did it change when your pH was lower as compared to when your pH was higher?
Well, the reason why is because in order to do this reaction, you do have to achieve a certain number of carbonates in the water to attract calcium to create calcium carbonate and precipitate it out of the water. It's a lot easier to do that when your pH is high, so you don't need as much soda ash.
Whereas if your pH is low, you need a lot of soda ash to get to that threshold to begin doing this. And when you add soda ash, you do two things very quickly. The first thing you do very quickly is you introduce a whole bunch of carbonates that were not there before. Like a whole bunch of... Uh, the way we're going to an-analogize this is if we have calcium ions in the water, calcium hardness, that are not already bound to something else, we're going to introduce a whole bunch of single ladies named carbonates, and they are going to be attracted to each other.
And so when you flood the pool with all these carbonates, a lot of calcium is going to get attracted to that. That's the first thing that's going to happen. The second thing is exactly what you observed as to why the alkalinity actually went down a little bit, is because it also raises the pH. And when you raise the pH past that nine-point-something, it's actually eight-point-three, you start seeing a conversion of bicarbonate into carbonate alkalinity.
Um, when you get that high those carbonates join that pack of carbonates that you just added. And so those carbonates actually bind to calcium, and they're gone when they go to the floor. So that actually reduces your total alkalinity.
Yeah, so it's about eight-point-three is, is, is roughly where the carbonates start to convert. So the higher you can get above eight-point-three, the higher the proportion of what you're going to see.
Now, how do we know how much is going to get removed? Now, the conventional wisdom when I was talking to Que Hales, I don't know, a few years ago, was it's about one to one, and he's right.
If you look at the molar weight of both of these molecules, calcium carbonate, which is, uh, basically scale or dust or whatever you want to call it, versus sodium carbonate, also called soda ash, which is literally the product that you're buying and throwing in as the white powder, they are almost identical in weight.
Calcium carbonate is 100 g/mol, and sodium carbonate or soda ash is 106 g/mol. So they're super close. So in your mind, you could think it's pretty much a one-to-one ratio. But we're not doing a one-to-one ratio of calcium carbonate because it's hard to measure pounds of calcium carbonate when you're measuring parts per million.
You also need to know your volume, you need to know a bunch of other stuff. So thanks to the calculations that John Wojtowicz did and the power of AI to actually make sense of it, um, it comes out that it's a ratio of 1.06 pounds of soda ash will flock out one pound of calcium, right? And but again, that's not really what we need to know.
We need to know how many parts per million it takes out. So what it actually is, is 0.88 pounds of soda ash, right here, reduces your calcium hardness in 10,000 gallons by 10 ppm. Let's extrapolate that. Let's say we want to go down 100 ppm in calcium.
That's 8.8 pounds of soda ash in ten thousand gallons. So if you have a twenty thousand gallon pool and you add 8.8 pounds, you're going to drop by about 50 ppm. Likewise, you can double that and do call it seventeen point something pounds, and you should take a hundred parts per million out.
The Orenda calculator, the-- if you go to Main Menu, uh, Other Calculators, I think it's called Other Calculators, and you go to the Chemi-culator, is actually super precise on this because it was based on the same Wojtowicz information, so it actually knows those formulas. And so if you are trying to reduce your calcium hardness, what you really should be trying to figure out is the pounds of soda ash based on that ratio of what you're trying to reduce.
So if you're trying to reduce calcium hardness by a hundred parts per million, just remember, per ten thousand gallons, that's 8.8 pounds of soda ash. And so you found this out almost by accident, didn't you?
Jared Stanley: I feel like, yeah.
Eric Knight: And, and
now that, now that, you see it, you're like, "Oh, that actually checks out.
That's pretty much exactly what I'm seeing."
Jared Stanley: Ja
Eric Knight: I love it. So here's the actual reaction. You have a calcium, what's called a cation, 'cause it's positive. There's two protons on that, and then you have a carbonate anion, 'cause there's two electrons on that, or two plus versus two minus. They bind together. You get calcium carbonate, it flocks out.
But here's what it means for a pro. If you were going to intentionally flock out calcium, the entire name of the game is intentionally spiking the LSI over the threshold.
That gap of where you land after you add the soda ash down to 0.0, that gap there is how much calcium you're going to flock out. Now, of course, you have to convert from pounds to ppm. Don't worry about it, the calculator does it for you. But what Jared noticed is once the LSI got back to zero, it stopped clouding, didn't it?
The water was happy. It was back in equilibrium. So he, what he also did was add an alum flock to get it down to the floor faster. I think that's a great idea, and you vacuum it to waste, and it's gone. So in order for this to work, you, you did pretty much everything right, Jared. So you, you have to force the LSI very high.
It works way better in warm water because, again, the LSI is higher, and cold water, calcium's a lot more soluble. Um, it can take a long time to sink, and like what you did, you used a flocculent. Another thing to consider is you can use enzymes, not because they're a flock, but because oils float. This stuff is trying to sink.
If they stick together, they stay suspended longer, especially when you're, like, removing phosphates. If you cloud those up, we notice this a lot with Orenda, that if you used enzymes, it dropped right out. If you didn't, it could stay cloudy for days. So just take interferences out so that the stuff gets to the floor.
Vacuum it to waste, and do not lower the pH until the desired result is met. Because if you do, it's going to undo what you just did. So that being said, that's what the research shows, and I hope this is making sense to you.
[00:43:50] Closing
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Eric Knight: And Jared, are you kind of feeling vindicated in what you've learned?
Jared Stanley: Oh. Um, if not, I learned way more talking to you about it, and I'm very appreciative of that. Um, I
Eric Knight: of you, man
Jared Stanley: Hey, I knew there was a lot more to it, um, but I wanted to get calcium out of pools
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Jared Stanley: and,
Eric Knight: get it. You
know, so much of this is theory versus practice, and yeah, a lot of things happen in theory, but the fact that you're recognizing in the field this is exactly what happened to you is awesome. This does actually work, and you're living proof of that
Jared Stanley: Yes, sir. And, and you got to sometimes when you have that big maintenance, if you have that big service account, you got to stop the whole world for, from spinning just to go fix this one pool that has a calcium of, of just because it has a calcium carbonate fog on it. Um, and it took me having to do that.
I needed to stop the world from spinning for a few hours and go make two dedicated trips and be intentional and use what I've learned through the calculator and the LSI over the course of four years and, and put it at work. And, and it's been working out. And that fog to this day has not come back on that woman's tile on her spillway. Heck, I even put borates in there. I put borates to help manage a high rising pH in a salt pool, and now her water's soft and, but let alone even without the borates, that issue's fixed. And, um, it's, it's an eyesore. It's an eyesore that can gradually grow on you as a homeowner and a pool professional, and it just continues to get worse and worse, and it happens so subtly. Before you know it, it's just built up, and then you're, you're calling an expert to come out there to balance water.
Eric Knight: Right. Well, it happens gradually to the homeowner. It happens suddenly to the pro who's not paying attention to it because they're visiting so many pools. And if you're not looking for these things, you can predict it's going to happen at some point, especially if your tap water, like in your case, has reasonably high alkalinity and high calcium hardness.
I'm in Charlotte. My alkalinity is 30 out of the tap. My calcium hardness is 40. I'm not at a risk of this happening in a, a single year. And now it may take five years for it to happen, and it could, but we also get a lot of rain in Charlotte. Not in the summer, but we do get a lot of rain. And so assuming a mesh cover in the winter or an uncovered pool, the likelihood of it happening here is a lot lower.
But that's if we're managing the LSI the way that we have been teaching it on this podcast, where you have a lower alkalinity in a hypochlorite and a saltwater pool. You have a lower pH ceiling intentionally. It's not the amount of calcium in your water that is driving this reaction. Now, that is a factor, but it's not the factor.
The factor is the aggregate of all these things, the LSI. So if you can limit how high that pH goes, you can limit how high the pH ceiling is, is what I mean to say. Then you can limit how high the LSI goes, and that's really what we're after here. So, um, if you can take more into control, you're going to be able to rule your pool a lot more effectively.
And Jared, you are living proof of that, and I am so happy you were able to get on the show. And I know you were a little nervous to be on the show and talk to all seven of our followers, but, uh, they are really happy to have you.
Jared Stanley: Yeah, I've, I, I have-- I've been listening to you for the last five years and, and, and the, the amount of knowledge I've been able to take out and, um, you know, b-being in the industry for more than fifteen years and having all these experiences, walking up to knowing you and, and learning your show, um,
Eric Knight: it working?
Jared Stanley: to... It's working and, and, and you can't un-you can't unsee what you've seen in the past. But when you, when you talk to somebody that's knowledgeable and understands their game, the bells will go ringing in your head from all the experiences you've ever had in your past, and then you became that much more knowledgeable.
'Cause the new information that's incoming and you're learning from, you're able to make sense of what you've experienced in the past, and you're a lot smarter than you know until... And, and with people that teach you that wisdom, you're able to tie everything in together and make more sense of everything that's happened to you as a service pro and even as a homeowner.
So I'm-- And, and for that, I'm much appreciative for
you and, and,
Eric Knight: grateful for you, man. Thank you. I was actually at a, a training event in Phoenix earlier this week, and I asked several of the pros that also do the program just like you do. They, they follow the Orenda calculator. They use the pH ceiling and, and all these things. They use the LSI. And I said, "If you knew today, like, if you knew what you knew today, you know, 10 years ago, how would you have acted differently?"
And they all just started laughing. They're like, "Oh, like, you can't un-know it." Like, once you see it work, the water becomes so much easier to manage. It is so much more profitable. It is so much simpler. The, the chemical savings are so real, and everybody who's just like, "Ah, no, I've been doing it. I'm comfortable."
I think comfort is the enemy of greatness in this sense. You know, nobody knows what they don't know, and, you know, I'm not here to tell you how to run your business, but I'm really glad you gave it a shot, and I'm so glad that it's helping you. And thank you so much for contributing your knowledge and wisdom to this growing audience of ours.
It's been a pleasure
Jared Stanley: My, my pleasure. And there's going to be a lot more that we're going to learn about this process, and there's going to be a lot more we learn about aluminum sulfate. Um, there's going to be a lot more we learn about flocking out of CYA. CYA is the only thing I have left that I want to learn how to flock out.
I know there's a way to do it. I'm going to find out how to do it.
Eric Knight: Mm.
Jared Stanley: Um, you know, you just, i- i- as long as we're learning things and we create a better predictability, we want to be able to predict water. We want to run a successful business, have profitable water, not just for us as, as service pros, but also for our customers because they, they deserve to have a great pool experience.
And, and a lot of these people, some people, they're not having that experience, and we need to, we need to get it together and find out how we can preserve that and preserve that experience, not just for us businesses, but for the people that own these pools that, that don't do the research. Um, so in that, I'm, I'm glad to be here, Eric, and i- it's been a, been a pleasure.
Eric Knight: cool. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy season. So Jared Stanley, thanks for being on the Rule Your Pool podcast. This has been episode 201. Like I said, we're in, we're in a new century of episodes. We have no idea what's coming, but we got a lot of suggestions and questions that have coming in.
The email address is ruleyourpool@gmail.com. You can also reach out to us on our Facebook. Just find Rule Your Pool. You'll find it there. And, um, yeah, I'm happy to be with you. I'm happy to continue doing this. It's been a pleasure. So take care everybody, and get out there and rule your pool. See ya.