High Levels of Calcium Hardness Will Destroy Your Swimming Pool

In many parts of the country, we deal with excessively high levels of Calcium Hardness in our swimming pools. This happens because our fill/tap water is hard. The water coming out of our tap is loaded with calcium, magnesium and other hardness minerals that will scale your water tile line, interior finish, filtration equipment, decorative water features and salt systems. This happens because as your water evaporates, the hardness minerals will remain in solution and gradually build up in concentration. When this occurs the scaling will occur which leads to problems for both residential and commercial swimming pool owners. Typically, the following are some of the problems:

• Scaling
• Staining of the interior finish
• Increase chemical usage
• Your water will feel old
• A decreased lifespan of all filtration equipment and interior finish

Swimming pools take a beating. Hard water will cause a lot of damage to them if you don’t monitor your Calcium Hardness, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), and Cyanuric Acid (CYA) levels regularly. As a general rule of thumb, most pool professionals including us will recommend a water change every two years! Why? We recommend every two years to prevent a lot of the issues described above from happening and to keep your pool looking great!

At Pure Water Industries, we offer Reverse Osmosis (RO) mobile filtration as an alternative to pool draining. This service is mobile and comes to your home or commercial property and recycles the water onsite. Since we use RO filtration we are able to lower these major problems while conserving 85% of the existing water in the swimming pool which means no exposed interior finish and no downtime!

Just this past week we recycled a 24,000-gallon salt pool that was struggling with high hardness. The following is the initial water chemistry:

Calcium Hardness – 840ppm

Total Dissolved Solids – 7112ppm

Salt – 4708ppm

CYA – 40ppm

With high levels of Calcium Hardness like this scaling was occurring on their electrode plates. The scaling prevented the salt system from working which is an extremely common problem. If you look at your user manual most salt chlorinators recommend calcium to be between 200-400ppm!

After filtering this swimming pool for 16 hours we were able to lower the levels to the following:

Calcium Hardness – 130ppm

Total Dissolved Solids – 824ppm

Salt – 712ppm

CYA – 0ppm

After adding conditioner and salt, the homeowner did confirm that their salt system was now working. At the completion of this service, we did recommend to them to have us come out every 1-2 years to prevent this from happening again! If you should have any questions about our service or how it can help you, contact us today!