Eric contrasts traditional reactionary pool care with what he's doing on his own pool, following the Orenda program. Minimalism wins the day.
00:00 - Introduction
02:00 - What is traditional pool care?
04:36 - Pool chemical conflicts
09:08 - Contrast that with Eric's pool on the Orenda program
14:34 - Simplify, and subtract things from the water
17:26 - Success is a choice
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112. Minimalism: Addition by Subtraction
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: Hey team. Welcome back to the Rule Your Pool podcast. I'm your host Eric Knight with Orenda, and this is episode 112. And I'm sorry for not getting these out every single Wednesday like I try to, I have come to the painful conclusion that if you're going to be putting out a podcast every single week, you really have to make time for it.
[00:00:19] The worst part is I haven't been traveling much. I've been here, I've seen my microphone each day and still couldn't sit down behind it and carve out the time to do it. And so I'm sorry for that. When you create content like this, you want to make sure that everything that you create is worth listening to. I've just been doing a lot of research and I'm trying to make sure that I have all of my ducks in a row. Everything's been verified. I've been talking to chemists. I've been reading a ton, that's what I've been focusing on. And so the past several episodes, if you've been listening to them, they haven't really been deep in chemistry, but we hope that it's still adding some value to you.
[00:00:57] In this episode. I'm talking about minimalism. I've met with a bunch of customers in the last couple of weeks over the phone and in person that have never heard this message. They didn't know there was a better way. And when we open their eyes to the fact that there is a way to do this spending a lot less on chemicals and a lot less frustration. And a lot more predictable water.
[00:01:21] I could just sense their excitement and somewhat disbelief. You know, how could I have been taught this for so long that it's not actually the way it is? And what I want to do is I want to compare what I'm doing on my pool. Those of you who are listening that did not see it all on Facebook, I bought a fixer upper house with a pool in very bad shape. Jarred and I talked about it actually next to the pool when you could hear the birds two or three episodes ago. And, uh, that pool was in really good shape right now. And I want to talk about what I'm doing compared to the traditional method of reactionary pool care. So this episode is about minimalism.
[00:01:57] Addition by subtraction.
What is traditional pool care?
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[00:02:00] Eric Knight: What is traditional pool care? What is reactionary pool care? What does that look like? I know we have audiences that range from pool owners to operators, to service companies, to builders. And I thank all of you for being here. So take what you will out of this, but I'm going to aim the first part of this towards the pool professional.
[00:02:44] Okay. The service professional in particular. How do you manage a typical pool? Of course, there's a lot of ways we can divide them up. We can go salt pools and other pools and trichlor pools versus liquid chlorine, or versus Cal hypo pools. And we have alternative sanitizers that are not even chlorine at all, which is another topic entirely, but there's not many of them.
[00:03:06] How do you manage those pools? Well, typically from what we hear, it's usually something like this. We have a primary sanitizer, maybe a secondary shock. We use acid to keep the pH within textbook ranges, ;;7.4-7.6, ideally. Alkalinity, which is added with sodium bicarbonate to try to stay between 80 and 120. Most people aim for about a hundred, I found. Which is kind of curious in itself, but we're going to go with it.
[00:03:31] You're trying to keep the alkalinity up to about a hundred, because that's what we're taught. Calcium chloride is not used as much as it probably should be, but you want your calcium between 200-400. And since most people are conditioned to seeing scale lines and calcium deposits, that we've been conditioned to think that calcium's not such a good thing. And of course we know it is, but most people don't know that. What we have observed is most pool professionals like to have calcium in the 200s. 250 or so it was about the average of what we hear.
[00:04:04] And then there are specialty chemicals. Specialty chemicals primarily are things like algaecide. Clarifiers. Floc. Phosphate remover. Sequestering agents. Stain removal, which is like a citric acid or ascorbic acid, things like that. Things that are not necessarily required, but they are designed to solve problems. Whether it's metals, or scale, or algae, or whatever it is.
[00:04:32] So you have your primaries, and then you have your ancillaries.
Pool chemical conflicts
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[00:04:36] Eric Knight: And so I've been asking customers over the past few years, but in particular, in the past few days. Tell me everything that you use on a pool. What's on your truck? What chemicals? And so they list them out and there's a lot of redundancies. And I keep seeing this nationwide. It's not unique to where I am, and it's not unique to where these customers are. It's everywhere.
[00:04:58] And what we see is chemicals that conflict with each other. One of the biggest conflicts is between sequestering agents that are phosphate based, because almost all of them are. And that's not a knock on them by the way, they work really well. But they are phosphate based. The important thing is that a phosphate remover is going to remove that product.
[00:05:17] So you're going to pay for a phosphate remover to wipe out a sequestering agent that you already paid for. Then the metals that it's bound to go free, which could then be oxidized, which contributes to chlorine demand. And you're paying for that chlorine, unless you have a salt system. So you're just conflicting with yourself and it's all costing money.
[00:05:38] Let's say you've got a pool and you put three or four trichlor tabs in it every single week into the feeder. And you may use a supplemental shock, but you get there and there's a staining issue. You're like, oh, I've got a metal problem. I'm going to put a sequestering agent in there.
[00:05:54] So you start with a sequestering agent, you use some ascorbic acid, which is a different product to lift the stain and it's super effective. It lifts right up. Awesome. You picked up the iron or the copper or whatever the stain was. Great work. So now, you start seeing a couple of weeks later, some algae starts showing up.
[00:06:12] Hmm, I need an algaecide. What type do you pick? You see, in the Orenda program, we don't use any algaecides. They all leave baggage behind that chlorine is going to have to deal with. They all leave behind long-term byproducts which will conflict with chlorine and maybe other things. The Orenda philosophy has three tenets. Be proactive, no chemical conflicts, and no long-term byproducts left behind.
[00:06:39] Algaecide is none of those three things. It's reactive. It absolutely conflicts after it does its job. And it leaves long-term byproducts behind. So what algaecide do you choose? Well, now you've got to deal with that algaecide. If it's ammonia-based or has the word quat in it, which is quaternary ammonia, you're going to get some combined chlorine. Then you're going to need more chlorine to get rid of that. If it's copper. Well, Hey, now you have new metals. But maybe if you're treating for algae, you're going to use other things too. You're not just going to shock.
[00:07:14] The habit in the industry is use a phosphate remover. Okay. Awesome. Put a phosphate remover in. What does that phosphate remover going to react with? Oh, yeah. It's going to react with the sequestering agent that you put in a few weeks ago to deal with the stain.
[00:07:27] So now you wipe out the sequestering agent. The metals go free. You have more chlorine demand because now the chlorine is going to oxidize that iron. Which may lead to another stain. And you may not have removed the actual phosphates that were involved in the first place. You actually removed the sequestering agent.
[00:07:47] I could go on and on and on. The point is this traditional pool care has a lot of chemical conflicts and a lot of overdosing. I didn't even get into pH control. Let's do that real quick. Same pool, pH keeps rising every week, what do we do? What we have to lower the pH. We got to get it back down. Okay. But when you do that, especially if you're trying to maintain 100 alkalinity, you're putting in a lot of acid.
[00:08:09] So you're doing that and you're wiping out a lot of alkalinity to lower the pH. And it's just going to rise again, especially if you re-up the alkalinity to get it back to 100. Now your pH ceiling is higher. You're going to have an LSI violation each week. Which is going to lead to a scaling issue or potentially cloudy water, because the pH is naturally rising due to Henry's law.
[00:08:30] Go back in our episodes and find containing pH versus controlling it. Find out why pH rises. We even have a hyperlink in the Orenda app. When you go to show secondary readings, tap pH ceiling. Read up on it. It's real.
[00:08:46] And so we see these conflicts with our customers and it just, it pains me to see this. It pains me to see that. Homeowners and pool professionals alike are buying way more than they should be to get water to behave. That's traditional pool care. That's reactionary pool care. And it's expensive. Oh, man is it expensive.
Contrast that with my pool on the Orenda program
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[00:09:08] Eric Knight: Let me just contrast what I'm doing in my pool, and see how it matches up with what you're doing in your pool. Mine is not a public pool. It's a backyard pool, and I could do whatever I want with it. In fact, I'm doing things to this pool this summer to deliberately destroy the pool. So mind you, down the road I'm going to deliberately screw up my chemistry. But for right now, I'm proving a point that chemistry can be great with very little. Very little work, very little effort. Okay.
[00:09:36] So here's what I've added. I've got all of my information written down in my show notes, not the Jarred would have read them anyway, if he were on this episode, but here we are. On May 9th. I did the green pool cleanup. And we talked about this a couple episodes ago, I didn't brush because I was on the video and I was distracted and that screwed me up. So it actually took almost a week to clean that pool out, which was stupid. It should have been 48 hours. But all that aside.
[00:10:04] Since that green pool cleanup, it has been a full month. I have added less than four gallons of chlorine. I do a half gallon, twice a week. So in the evenings, by the way, after the sun sets. So I'm not even at four gallons of chlorine yet, and it's been a month.
[00:10:22] I put in granular cyanuric acid to get to 40 parts per million. I use the Orenda app and I measured it out, eight pounds of granular cyanuric acid. And then I dissolved it, which by the way, I haven't personally done that myself, that doesn't take forever. That takes five ever. If you've ever tried to dissolve granular cyanuric acid, pool pros listening to this are probably laughing because you know! You have to stir that for awhile. And I would've gotten hot water from the house if I had hot water. And here I am in the middle of this renovation, I still don't have hot water.
[00:10:55] I'm awake today though, because cold showers are a wonderful way to wake up. But I couldn't get hot water to dissolve it any faster. So that took quite a bit of stirring, but I did get it in. So I put in the CYA to get up to 40 parts per million, and that was once.
[00:11:09] I added 50 pounds of calcium chloride to get up to about 400 calcium hardness. Once. I chelated that with five ounces of SC-1000. Now, granted I had already put in the purge dose of SC-1000 before I did, or I'm sorry, at the very end of the green pool cleanup. So I'd already purged. I should say that that came at the end of the green pool clean up. So I have that in the water. I added five more ounces of SC-1000 to chelate the barrel of calcium chloride.
[00:11:40] I then only lowered the pH of the pool just enough to get below 7.8 so that, that chelated calcium could stay dissolved. If I added that to 8.1 pH water, then it wouldn't dissolve very easily. Now, thankfully, I know what I'm doing. I took the time to actually chelate it and get it cleared in the barrel before I put it in. The reason I'm bringing that up is most people will put it in a bucket and they'll add it while it's still frothy and milky. And if you do that into an 8.1 pH is not going to stay dissolved. It's going to fall out. So I didn't do that. But that was 14 ounces of muriatic acid, and that was four weeks ago.
[00:12:20] I have not added a drop of muriatic acid since. It's been a month. My pH is exactly at the pH ceiling. It is exactly where I want it to be. I haven't touched it. I added eight ounces of PR-10,000 the first week. So that was three weeks ago, I guess. It clouded up. And then I backwashed the DE filter and recharged it with six pounds of DE.
[00:12:46] I have not added any algaecide I never will. I have not added any flocs or clarifiers. And yet my water is beautiful. It is perfectly crystal clear.
[00:13:00] So as a recap, under four gallons of chlorine in a month. I only added CYA once. My CYA is still between 30 and 40, we had a lot of rain. It's hard to tell exactly what it is, but it's just over 30. My calcium hardness is around 400. My alkalinity tests somewhere between 50 and 60. Again, we had a lot of rain, so I'm going to call it 55 parts per million.
[00:13:30] My pH ceiling is 8.02. When I test it on the Taylor kit, it looks like exactly eight. Might be slightly higher. But I know it hasn't spiked. I know what spiking looks like. It's a much darker color. I'm nowhere near spiked. I'm not etching this pool. My LSI is perfectly balanced. I'm at 79 degrees Fahrenheit, 2200 TDS. Everything is in line.
[00:13:55] I've contained the pH. If I need to add something like bicarb, which I may do, because we're expecting some more thunderstorms coming in. And if it gets below 50, I never want alkalinity that low. So I will add some sodium bicarb to get up towards 60 ish, 60 something. Uh, I'm going to add that bicarb, but I can't just add that over 8.0 pH because it won't stay in solution very easily.
[00:14:17] So why will lower the pH with some diluted acid first, and then I will add the bicarb. But that's it.
[00:14:26] 14 ounces of acid in a month. 24,000 gallon pool. Crystal clear. That's minimalism.
Simplify, and subtract things from the water
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[00:14:33] Eric Knight: It doesn't mean that you can do this if you have a commercial pool. You can't get your pH over 7.8, whether I agree with that or not.
[00:14:40] This is what I'm doing on my private pool. If you're a homeowner listening to this, you have the right to do whatever you want in your pool. Rule YOUR pool. I'm ruling my pool and I'm spending very little money doing it. I'm doing this to prove a point. This can be done. There is a better way. I don't need algaecides. I got enzymes and phosphate remover, and I've got a chelant for the metals.
[00:15:03] I chlorinate regularly. Small amount, I don't need a lot, but I do it regularly. Twice a week in the evenings. It's easy. To the trade out there. You're visiting a pool once a week. How do you get chlorine to hold for a week? You take things out of the water that chlorine would otherwise have to attack. That's what you do.
[00:15:23] You don't need to have 80, 90 cyanuric acid to hold chlorine for a week. Yeah, that might do it, because it's going to slow down your chlorine, but you can have other problems. The higher your CYA, the higher your likelihood of algae.
[00:15:37] I don't need a lot of CYA. I'm holding chlorine just fine. Every four days, I'm still reading some. And then I wrap it with half a gallon. That's it. So the point here is, there is a better way to do this. It's not to make a chemical cocktail in your backyard. It's to subtract things from the equation. That's minimalism. It's addition by subtraction.
[00:16:02] Let's make your water better by taking things out. Let's get the non-living organics out. If you're relying on chlorine alone to remove things like organics and the oils from leaves and pine needles and whatever else you have, yeah, you're not going to be able to hold chlorine for a week, especially in the hotter water. Combine that with people using the pool, or dogs or whatever else. You need something in there to handle those organics.
[00:16:27] Tap water? Hell, it's mandated now by the EPA to put anti-corrosion measures in city water. That's why phosphates are in there. Sequestering agents are mostly phosphate based. And by the way, it's a good thing they're in there. Protecting us, it's not bad for our health, it's just annoying for swimming pools. You got to deal with the phosphates somehow.
[00:16:46] Yes, it could be more work. I spoke to somebody just yesterday in California. The phosphates went up in 2021. He's right. They're probably going to keep going up as the infrastructure gets older. That's more filter cleanings. That's more vacuuming. It's just part of it. The goalposts have been moving for decades. It's not like they just started moving in the past year. We need to be staying on top of what the tap water is.
[00:17:13] Every pool is a little bit unique in that its surroundings are different. It's amount of sunlight during the day is different it's bay. Their load is different, but what can you do on every pool that is going to make a difference?
Success is a choice
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[00:17:26] Eric Knight: It starts with your mindset. It starts with your attitude. What can I take out of this water? What can I do to simplify my job? If you go in with that mindset, water starts behaving a lot differently. Give it the balance it craves. Make sure that at the pH ceiling, which is conveniently in the Orenda app now, make sure that that pH ceiling allows you to be LSI balanced when your pH is at that ceiling. That's what I have.
[00:17:56] And I've used 14 ounces of acid in a month on a 24,000 gallon pool. No lie. I'm documenting it. I'll probably publish everything I did eventually. Because it's working. And I can work for you too.
[00:18:09] If you have questions about this. Reach out, podcast@orendatech.com, but I encourage you if you're looking for specifics on your own pool, the better way to do it is start with our help center. ask.orendatech.com. Read the FAQ's. Read our blog. Try to apply it to what you can do with your pool. And if you have specific questions, then you can submit a question at the top, or you can email me.
[00:18:34] I hope you found this episode valuable. I'm your host, Eric. And in the next one, we're going to talk to Tyler and then we're going to talk to Terry. So I look forward to speaking with those guys and hopefully you get a lot out of it. So have a great week have a great season this has been the 112th episode of the Rule Your Pool podcast. Thank you so much for continuing to listen and sharing it with your friends. Take care everyone.