Thinking about switching a route's worth of tabs to bleach, before I commit

Started by tampapoolguy · · 2 replies
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#1
Been running trichlor on about a dozen accounts because it's what the customer inherited from the last guy, and I'm sick of chasing CYA on every single one of them. Want to switch those over to liquid chlorine and manage pH with acid instead but I've never done a full route conversion before, always just started new customers on liquid from day one. Anybody done this on a bunch of pools at once, what am I not thinking about. Worried about the jump in acid demand and whether I'm gonna get callbacks about cloudy water the first week or two while things settle. My own pool's been on liquid for years so I know how it behaves, just never flipped a whole group of them over in one shot.

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#2
Not a pro but curious what CYA those dozen accounts are actually sitting at right now before you flip the switch. If they've been on tabs for a while some of them are probably up in the 100+ range and that changes the whole plan, you'd want to know if you're draining any of them partway before starting liquid or just riding the CYA down slow with splash out and rain. Doing that math per pool seems like it'd matter more than the acid demand question honestly, since dilute you can always compensate on chlorine dosing but sky high CYA just sits there making everything sluggish regardless of what you're adding.
#3
Derek's dead on about testing CYA first, that's not a plumbing question but it's the right one, no sense guessing when a test strip tells you. Acid demand is the part you can actually plan for though, once CYA comes down naturally pH is gonna want to climb harder with straight bleach since you lost that acidic buffer the tabs were giving you for free. My own pool took a couple months of dumping more muriatic than I expected before it leveled out into a rhythm, now I barely touch it, but that first stretch caught me off guard even on just my own water let alone a dozen accounts at once.