Eric explains How to use SC-1000, what it does, and how it's different from a sequestering agent. He also touches on frequently asked questions about SC-1000.
00:00 - Intro
01:56 - What is a sequestering agent?
05:55 - What is a chelating agent?
08:09 - How to use SC-1000
09:14 - We are not in the stain-removal business. But SC-1000 can help soften and remove scale.
12:49 - SC-1000 considerations to be aware of. First, water temperature matters.
14:27 - Second consideration: SC-1000 wipes out chlorine until it can do its job.
16:32 - SC-1000 is biodegradable, but that requires bacteria that cannot survive in a swimming pool. So it has staying power.
17:33 - Frequently asked questions about SC-1000
19:24 - Wrap up, summary, and thanks for listening!
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65. How to use SC-1000 Scale & Metal Control
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: Ahhh. Nothing quite says "I've got free time to listen to a podcast" like May in the swimming pool business. Am I right? This is the slow time of year. Isn't it? Nobody's got anything to do. Got all the time in the world to listen to a podcast.
[00:00:14] The fact that you actually still do astonishes me. And I want to tell you, sincerely, it means so much to us that you actually listen to this podcast. And we know you do because you give us feedback. So those of you who have been emailing us and messaging us on Facebook and, and all that, the email, by the way, is podcast@orendatech.com. We hear you.
[00:00:37] We get those emails and the requests and the questions. They're awesome. They're all being put in a queue for future episodes. So thank you for that. We try to provide value and not waste your time. That's why I've been so hesitant to do these past few episodes because to me, they feel like a waste of time. I don't like talking about ourselves.
[00:00:56] But here's the truth. Most of the calls we get are about how to use our products. I don't get so many calls on wanting to understand Henry's Law and the LSI. I wish I did. That'd be a more productive conversation, I think. But it's more like, "how do I use this product?" Or, "Hey, I just bought this product. What do I do?" That's why we're doing these episodes.
[00:01:15] And we are doing this journey together. Once we get through them. In this four, maybe five part series of products. We're going to get back to the good stuff. So thank you for being patient. Thank you for being here. I'm your host Eric Knight. And this is episode 65. How to use SC-1000 scale and metal control.
[00:01:56] Okay. SC-1000 is our chelating agent. It is not a sequestering agent, but it does a very similar thing. It just does it in a different way. So I think describing how SC-1000 works, I think we should put it in context first of "what's the difference between sequestering and chelating?"
[00:02:16] It's a valid question. Because they're so similar. A sequestering agent, like most of the products that you can get in the market, is, crudely simplified, basically a metal magnet. It is attracting metals and minerals to it. Heavy metals, which could be oxidized, which could cause stains and discoloration, would be like iron, and copper, and manganese.
[00:02:39] And minerals, as we call them, minerals would be the alkali earth metals, primarily calcium and magnesium. And you might be thinking "calcium is a metal?" Yeah, it technically is a metal. It is an alkali earth metal. And they behave the same way, except that the minerals like calcium and magnesium can be carbonated, not oxidized, and the heavy metals are not going to be carbonated. They're going to be oxidized and attacked by chlorine.
[00:03:05] Here's what a sequestering agent does. It attracts them based on their valence. So protons or electrons or whatever. And it'll bind them into a clump. A bigger particle and who knows? Maybe it's five iron, maybe it's 50 iron. I have no idea. I'm not pretending to be a chemist. I do not know the specifics of how much iron, a sequestering agent can hold.
[00:03:25] And when it does that, say the proton is bound to the sequestering agent, means that that metal or mineral is unavailable to be effected by something else. In other words, it's spoken for. So if you've got chlorine in the water, which I hope you do, it cannot oxidize a sequestered metal. There's nothing for it to swap electrons with. There's nothing for the oxygen to replace.
[00:03:50] Same goes for carbonate ions carbonating calcium to create calcium carbonate. If that calcium is sequestered, the two protons on that calcium are not available so that the two electrons on carbonate ions can bind to it perfectly. That way a sequestering agent is a scale inhibitor or scale preventer, and a stain preventer.
[00:04:16] Now the thing about sequestering agent is it's not permanent. That's not a knock on the product. They actually work extremely well. They put sequestering agents in our drinking water ever since Flint, Michigan, because it protects us. It protects the infrastructure. It inhibits scale in the pipes. It also inhibits corrosion in the pipes. And if there are metals in the water. It makes those metals bind together into larger particles so they could be filtered out easier so that we don't drink them. Or at least that's the goal.
[00:04:46] And if any of you listening have been in the water treatment industry or you're a chemical engineer or a chemist in that field, please reach out. I want to learn more.
[00:04:54] There's a lot of sources online, but there's a lot of fluff and it's kind of hard to distill what's what in that space. podcast@orendatech.com. I would love to hear from you. Because I am fascinated by what they put in our drinking water. And in fact, a lot of the questions that we get have to do with, "well, why wasn't this a problem 10 years ago? Or 20 years ago?"
[00:05:13] It's like, yeah. Well, the drinking water is changing all the time. So it's kind of like moving the goalposts because you don't know what's coming out of the tap. Newsflash, most tap water nowadays contains phosphate-based sequestering agents. That's the other thing I wanted to say. Most of these sequestering agents that you can buy in the pool industry are going to be phosphate based. Perhaps not all, but most.
[00:05:36] So it's not permanent because chlorine can oxidize these things. Sunlight can break them down. And of course, PR-10,000 will wipe them right out. No problem. And then all those metals go free. And you're back at square one. So just keep that in mind. They work pretty well. Actually they work very well. They're just not there forever.
[00:05:55] Okay now. The metal magnet. That's a sequestering agent. What is SC-1000? SC-1000 is a chelating agent. You're going to get basically the same net results in a different way. So instead of attracting all these metals to it, our product will spread out. It sort of coats the walls on a startup because it is spreading out through the water. And what it will do is it will find metals and minerals and individually isolate them ion by ion.
[00:06:27] For the chemists out there. I hope I'm saying that right. Maybe they're anions or cations. I'm not trying to be that specific, but just an individual iron. Or individual calcium. An individual copper.
[00:06:39] Binds to that and doesn't let go. And it keeps them separate. So if you're trying to filter out metals, a sequestering agent makes more sense because it's gonna be a bigger clump. It's going to be a bigger particle. SC-1000 is not going to be that much bigger than an individual ion. So if you're trying to filter out metals, you need a metal-specific filter for that to work.
[00:07:02] Because chelated iron for instance is going to go right through a sand or cartridge filter. Maybe a DE filter could capture it. I'm not exactly sure. Um, I don't think it would, but I could be wrong on that. That's not my specialty. The point is, the two different products address metals in two different ways, but you get the same net result. These metals are spoken for. These minerals are spoken for.
[00:07:27] So SC-1000 chelates them. Meaning that calcium is not going to get carbonated and therefore it's a scale inhibitor. And that metal is not going to be oxidized. Therefore it is a stain inhibitor. Or stain preventer. Both of those are very good things.
[00:07:45] So I would say SC-1000 is better for the long game. It is really a preventative thing. It is not so good at lifting stains. That's not what it's made to do. I suppose it could help. But it's not what it's made to do. It's not made to undo something that's already there. It's much better at speaking for these metals, grabbing them and holding on forever. Or for a very long time. I guess nothing's forever, but. Anyway.
[00:08:09] Now, I suppose this is the time where I should actually explain how to use SC-1000. Um, you pour it in. Nailed it.
[00:08:22] In all seriousness. You can pretty much add it anywhere. The purge dose should be divided up if it's in season. But if it's the beginning of the season, just dump it in. That said, if you are putting this on a feeder pump for a commercial pool, let's say, you want it to be tapped into the return line as the last thing in the pump room. You don't want it going in before the filter or before the chlorinator or whatever.
[00:08:46] It's best to put it in last. That's because you want it to have time to bind up and do what it needs to do. As opposed to potentially wiping out chlorine from the chlorinator. So that's just something to consider. Whereas enzymes can be tapped ideally before the filter. You want to put SC 1000 last.
[00:09:07] But, uh, yeah. Just pour it in. I probably should've just left it at that huh.
[00:09:14] Now let's move on to the problems that SC 1000 is used to help with. If you have a stain. We're not in that business. That's not what we do. You're going to want to look at a different process or a sequestering agent or something else just look elsewhere because that's really not our core business. Scale, however? Yeah, we can help you there.
[00:09:35] Scale, if your water is soaking it, let's say it's underwater. SC-1000 combined with LSI management, or LSI balance, I should say. We can clean up scale. Takes time. It's not like putting acid on it and getting instant gratification and results. It's going to take time because we're, we're basically, um, Chemically breaking it down and pulling it back into solution. That's what we're doing.
[00:10:01] If the scale is above the waterline, as so much scale is, like that evaporation waterline, to some degree there's only so much you can do. Because if you have SC-1000 in your water, it can't reach what's above the waterline. It's just dried there. So you would actually have to plug your overflow and intentionally raise the water level in your pool to soak that line typically for two or three weeks.
[00:10:28] Again, it's sort of a long game that you're doing this, but you will soften and remove scale. If you have enough SC-1000 in the water, AND you are balancing the LSI. You have to do both. It used to be that people would call us and say, " Hey, this SC-1000, it's not cleaning up all the scale, you know, it's helping, but it's not getting it all." Come to find out they're chasing pH, putting way too much acid in, not diluting it. Getting the pH rebound. And then they have a purple number on the Orenda app.
[00:11:00] Yeah, I can't help you with that. Because you're actually causing a bigger problem while you're trying to fix the first one. So you need the LSI balance and the SC-1000 for this to work. We have a procedure in our website, procedures.orendatech.com, or if you're using our app, go to the main menu > procedures. Type in "scale" and you will see "how to soften and remove scale". Just follow that step-by-step, it's pretty easy. It just takes time, like, just think. The water has to soak the affected areas. That's what matters.
[00:11:30] So if it's on a spillway, run the water so that it's flowing constantly. If it's not flowing, I can't help you. SC-1000 can't get to it. It can only reach what it can reach. That should be common sense, but you know, nowadays common sense is not so common.
[00:11:46] Prevention, however is much easier. Prevention is get the SC-1000 in early in the season. Or at startup. And speak for all of these metals. And if you know that there's metals in the tap, like you're on well water or something. Just do the weekly maintenance dose to speak for whatever is coming through the tap week after week.
[00:12:09] That's it. Do that, keep your LSI balanced, you shouldn't have an issue. If you have a ton of metals and you want to get them out, well use a specific metal filter. Like there's these pouches you can put in strainer baskets. They work really well with SC-1000. We've seen it. We recommend them all the time. They're not our product, but they work.
[00:12:30] So you can get metals out that way, but don't expect your sand or cartridge filter to pull it out with SC-1000 on its own. So now that we've explained... we? Me, I alone in my closet studio, I've explained to the best of my ability what SC-1000 does. It's a chelating agent.
[00:12:49] Let's talk about some considerations to be aware of. First. Water temperature. This is a product that was not made for pools. It was made for cooling towers and power plants. Like high temperature boiler systems. And steam systems. So the higher the temperature, the better it works. Think spas. Think heat exchangers.
[00:13:14] If the water is cold. It will go slower. Now, most chemistry is like this. We've talked about this before. You know, oxidation from chlorine is slower in cold water too. Just about everything is slower in cold water. It really matters for SC-1000 though. The colder the temperature, the much slower it works. If the water is cold enough, the SC-1000 is in there but it can't really do anything. It kind of goes dormant below about 65 degrees or about 18 degrees Celsius.
[00:13:44] Let's say you're adding calcium to winterize and it's october, and your water temperature is in the 60ºs, a good way to activate it is put the SC-1000 in the bucket or the barrel with the calcium chloride, because the calcium chloride gives off a lot of heat.
[00:14:01] That heat is what activates SC-1000. And you could pre chelate that calcium when it goes in. That's a very, very good thing to do, because if you don't it. You know, you don't want to winterize with SC-1000 because it's not really gonna do anything in the winter. Whereas, if you just put a small amount to chelate, the calcium you're adding, that's very effective.
[00:14:20] It's much better to add this in the spring as the water is warming up. So keep that in mind. Temperature matters.
[00:14:27] And that brings me to the next consideration. SC-1000 conflicts with chlorine until it has bound to a metal or mineral. In other words. Chlorine attacks it until it has a chance to do its job. Chlorine doesn't know what SC-1000 is. It views it as an oxidant, so it tries to get it out of the water and fails. Because SC-1000 is immune to oxidation. The way that the chemistry works is over my head, quite frankly, but we do know that you could put gallons and gallons and gallons of chlorine in your pool, and you purge with SC-1000? You will have zero chlorine pretty quickly. Because it hasn't had time to bind to the metals.
[00:15:09] That's why it's so great on a startup, cause you haven't chlorinated yet. You're going to chlorinate on the third day. So you have plenty of time for it to do its job, find its metals, and do its thing. And then it's neutrally charged and chlorine ignores it basically. They cohabitate just fine. That initial purge dose is what wipes out chlorine.
[00:15:28] So it's all about time. The higher the temperature, the less time. If you get SC-1000 into circulation quickly, and the temperature is, you know, 80 something or even higher. Uh, you're talking like two days of no chlorine, if you're not careful.
[00:15:46] If it's colder, it could be a week. You gotta be aware of that. So what we do to kind of work around this is we don't purge all at once, unless it's a startup, or you haven't chlorinated yet. Like in the spring time. You can divide this up. It's not a race. You could say, "okay, I need one quart per 10,000 gallons, which is the purge dose, but maybe I'm just going to divide that 32 ounces into three trips. And do 12 ounces the first time, 10 ounces the next time, and 10 ounces the third time." Boom. I got my purge dose over three weeks.
[00:16:18] That makes a lot of sense. It works very well. So divide that up so that you avoid zeroing out your chlorine. And this is especially important if you're purging in the middle of the summer, because zero chlorine for a week in the summer. No good.
[00:16:32] Now the third consideration is SC-1000 is biodegradable. So when you drain water, and it goes into the watershed there's bacteria in that water downstream that can break it down, no problem. But that bacteria cannot survive in a swimming pool. Therefore SC-1000 has a lot of staying power. It'll be in that water season after season. And like every product we have, it's NSF-50 certified. It is non-toxic. So it's not a bad thing to have it in your water for a long time. You want those metals and minerals spoken for.
[00:17:02] So it's long-term protection, sort of like an insurance policy. As we've mentioned before in our philosophy at Orenda, we want proactive pool care with no chemical conflicts and no long-term byproducts left behind or no harmful longterm byproducts left behind.
[00:17:19] This stays in the water for a long time, but it is not harmful. It's actually helping you for a long time. And we also don't have a conflict because there's no phosphates in SC-1000. So PR-10,000 is not going to wipe it out like it would a sequestering agent.
[00:17:33] All right. Let's move to the frequently asked questions and wrap this episode up.
[00:17:38] First. "How long until it is safe to swim after using SC-1000?" uh, it's really just about, are you able to hold your chlorine level? So if you divide up the purge dose and you don't zero out chlorine, you can swim, same time. There's no toxicity risk. There's no health concerns on that. Just make sure that you have a free chlorine reading. Okay. Because you will reduce chlorine.
[00:18:00] Now on weekly dose, you're not going to notice it because it's such a small dose. It's three ounces per 10,000 gallons a week. If you're maintaining on that. That's not enough to really impact your chlorine level, at least in our experience, it does not. So the answer is. You don't have to wait. You can use it, just check your chlorine level to be safe. All right.
[00:18:20] The next one is, "does it leave behind a residual?" Yes, it does, because as I said before, it binds these metals and it doesn't let go. It's in there for the long haul. So there is a residual left behind. And that's a good thing.
[00:18:33] Um, let's see, we get the question that I think I spent half the episode talking about already as "how does SC-1000 compare to other sequestering agents?" Again, sequestering agents cluster things together. Ours is a chelating agent, and so it keeps things separate, but it holds on to them for longer.
[00:18:49] Uh, " can SC-1000 be used in saltwater pools?" Absolutely. And it is. It is a scale inhibitor. So a big question we get is saltwater flakes. We had a whole episode on that, as you know, and this helps keep your salt cell clean. Of course, it's about the LSI and the lower alkalinity. We talked about Henry's law and containing pH, but yes, this is an excellent insurance policy to help keep those salt cells cleaner for longer.
[00:19:17] Finally, "what is the shelf life of SC-1000?" It's an indefinite shelf life, just like everything else. Just do not let the product freeze.
[00:19:24] So to wrap this episode up. SC-1000 is our chelating agent that addresses metals and minerals. It is primarily used in our startup process because you're adding a bunch of calcium in, you're trying to protect that plaster and keep calcium carbonate in solution. That's what it's really, really good for. It is not meant to remove stains.
[00:19:47] It's great at preventing them because it'll hold onto individual ions of metal or minerals like calcium and not let go. It's great for preventing scale. It is great for preventing stains. But it's not made to remove stains. It will remove scale with enough time and, uh, soaking of the calcium deposits.
[00:20:09] I feel like I've just beat this dead horse repeatedly. I should have planned this episode a little better. But, you know, like I said earlier, it's May in the pool business, so it's not like I have anything else going on.
[00:20:21] Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. I know it was a little scatterbrained on this one. We've got a few more to go. In the next one we're going to talk about enzymes. The one after that will be clarifier and we might do one on SPA-500 too, but, we'll see when we get there.
[00:20:36] If you have any questions, the email address is podcast@orendatech.com. Or reach out to us on social media, contact us through the app. You know, we're not hard to find. Thank you so much. I'm your host, Eric Knight. And I look forward to having you in the next episode, take care of everyone.