Yes, it does! In fact, it does it exceptionally well. Our Puripool Process can remove excess CYA (Cyanuric Acid) while the rest of the pool is processing and lowering calcium, salt, bacteria, viruses, phosphates, etc. Many of our Service Providers (as well as ourselves) get called out to primarily lower CYA in areas where the concern over calcium removal is not the driving force. We know of nothing that is capable of removing excess CYA as quickly or efficiently as a Reverse Osmosis pool filtration.
What is Cyanuric Acid?
The purpose of CYA is not to make you sound smart when you casually toss it out in conversation. In an outdoor pool (indoor pools typically do not require any CYA) with no CYA, chlorine is consumed within the first 2 hours of sunlight hitting the pool. CYA serves to protect the chlorine (sometimes called sunscreen for chlorine) and allow it to stick around longer. However, too much CYA will bind over the chlorine and will not allow it out to work. We often hear that “I can’t keep chlorine in my pool” when it really is present but unable to break through the grip of CYA. In the end, there is a direct relationship to the amount of CYA in a pool and the proper chlorine level. The multiplier to figure out how much chlorine (in ppm) you need is .075 In the case of a pool with 40 ppm CYA, we would take 40 times .075 to get a minimum chlorine residual of 3 ppm (we always talk about free chlorine here). A pool with 80 ppm then would require a minimum of 6 ppm free chlorine as 80 X .075 = 6. Oftentimes in our industry, we hear that 2-4 pp free chlorine is good, with no regard to the relationship it has with CYA. With this simple example, you can see that a pool with 80 ppm CYA and only a 4 ppm free chlorine residual is asking for trouble (algae)! You must either lower your CYA level or increase your free chlorine to keep a safe and sanitary pool in this case.
How To Remove CYA From Your Swimming Pool
The simplest way to lower CYA in your swimming pool is using Reverse Osmosis (RO) filtration or what we like to call “Puripool.” We recently recycled more than 40-million gallons of water and typically we are hired to lower Calcium Hardness, TDS or CYA. With our service, there is no need to drain the swimming pool and we are able to give you the best water quality to swim in. We recently recycled a 30,000-gallon swimming pool with the following issues…
Initial Chemistry
Calcium Hardness – 1400ppm
Total Dissolved Solids – 6528ppm
Cyanuric Acid – 100ppm
After filtering this swimming pool for 22 hours we were able to lower all of their above concerns to the following:
Ending Chemistry
Calcium Hardness – 150ppm
Total Dissolved Solids – 752ppm
Cyanuric Acid – 0ppm
As stated above you will need to add CYA to help balance out the water chemistry but having it lower than 100ppm will definitely make it easier to maintain the swimming pool and not deal with algae. So, to answer your question, Reverse Osmosis filtration will lower CYA and it does an amazing job at it too!