Rather than simply using chemicals you can utilize some household products to keep your pool water clean and save money on the process.
Here’s how to use household products to clean your pool.
How To Use Household Products To Clean Your Pool
Regular baking soda can be used by salt water pool owners to raise the pH in their pool in a natural way. It’s one of the ways that natural products bought from your grocery store may help not only your pool maintenance regimen but your wallet as well.
One of the necessary aspects of salt water pool ownership is proper water chemistry and keeping the various aspects of water management within reasonable levels. This ensures a clean, clear, safe swimming pool and also protects pool equipment. Improper water chemistry often requires more chemical usage to quickly fix problems and can lead to shorter lifespans for pumps, chlorinators, salt cells and more.
When To Use Baking Soda In Your Pool
A pool should have a pH level between 7.2 and 7.8. Baking soda has a pH of 8 making it naturally alkaline. Thus baking soda can be used to raise pH if it’s low. Typically, if pH is low alkalinity will be low as well and this is a good time to use baking soda to raise both to acceptable levels.
Having excessive chlorine in your pool may lower both the pH and alkalinity which can not only irritate eyes and skin but can have negative affects on pool equipment. It can corrode metal ladders and damage the vinyl liner and other pool components. Raising your pH with baking soda will also help to keep alkalinity within range.
How much baking soda do you need to maintain your pool and raise pH levels? Well, more than you’ll find in a pack of baking soda you buy in the store, that’s for sure. The good news is that you can buy larger amounts of baking soda and the better news is that many commercial pool products that are used to raise the pH use baking soda as the primary component. So by buying baking soda directly, you’re probably going to save money and are using a natural product at the same time.
To figure out how much baking soda you need, we can consult Arm & Hammer whose famous baking soda brand of the same name offers the following advice:
A rule of thumb is 1.5 lbs. of baking soda per 10,000 gallons of water will raise alkalinity by about 10 ppm.
Arm & Hammer
So if you had a fairly standard 20,000 gallon pool and needed to raise pH by 10 ppm, you’d need to add about 3 lbs of baking soda to the water. Your local pool store will most likely carry larger quantities of baking soda than you will find in a grocery store. The benefit from buying from a pool store is the bulk price you will most likely get along with instructions from the manufacturer in terms of how much to use and how to introduce it into the pool.
Using Household Products To Clean Your Pool
Baking soda isn’t the only household product that may be used to maintain your pool. Here are several others that can be used for cleaning and maintenance purposes.
Vinegar
Diluted regular white vinegar can be used to clean and brighten your pool stairs – the white plastic ones leading into the shallow end – as they tend to get grubby with stains around the top of the water level. Vinegar can also be used to get rid of white stains around the pool area, typically calcium deposits.
If you have interlocking bricks or other material around your pool that enables weed growth, you can also use diluted vinegar in a spray bottle to kill the weeds between the bricks. You might also use remaining diluted vinegar to clean metal around the pool namely your metal pool ladder.
Lemon juice
Diluted lemon juice can also be used for cleaning the pool area and for smell control. I’ve noticed that both the pool skimmer at the side of the pool and the pump basket often get a bad smell, like dead worms or a fishy smell. If an animal like a bird or mouse dies in your pool and ends up in the skimmer for a few days without you noticing, it can smell bad, too. Using a lemon spray to scrub the inside of the skimmer and basket can help to deodorize and clean the area in question. The aforementioned vinegar spray may also be used for this cleaning.
Vitamin C Tablets
Vitamin C tablets can be used as a stain remover. If you have pool liner stains especially on the walls of the pool or in the shallow end where the pool floor is easily accessible, a vitamin C tablet can be used to rub them out including metal stains on the liner.
Muriatic Acid
Muriatic acid – also known as hydrochloric acid (HCL) which is the active ingredient – is used by pool owners to lower the total alkalinity and pH in a pool. Alkalinity and pH work in unison so impacting one will affect the other. It comes in liquid format and is hazardous so care needs to be used when working with it. It is a helpful chemical however to keep pool chemistry in check.
Borax
You can use 100% Borax as an alternative to baking soda to raise pH. While baking soda tends to raise both pH and alkalinity, you may use Borax instead to raise pH when you don’t want to raise alkalinity. In general, you use 20 ounces of Borax for every 5,000 gallons of water in your pool. Check out this online calculator to fill in the desired pH range to see how much Borax you would use for your pool.
Tennis Ball
A clean, new tennis ball can be tossed into your pool to absorb oil from the pool that enters through various source: Suntan lotions, creams, body oils. They all enter the pool and end up in the filter. A cartridge filter benefits from soaking it overnight in a filter cleaning solution to remove oils that have attached themselves to the cartridges over time. A tennis ball floating in the water for a day or so may help to naturally attract and remove oils on its own.
Salt Water Levels In A Salt Water Pool
One of the benefits of a salt water pool is the relatively limited usage of chemical chlorine products. While chlorine tends to be used to open the pool in the spring and at closing in the autumn, the salt system chlorinator converts regular salt into chlorine but a slightly different version that the chemical one. Chemical chlorine products tend to produce a strong smell that you notice on your clothes and skin after swimming. Not so with salt-generated chlorine.
With a salt water pool, you maintain a salt level of around 2,700 – 3,400 ppm (parts per million) and a chlorine level of 1 – 3 ppm. The salt water level in the pool is less than 1/10 what you would experience in the ocean which has a salt level of about 35,000 ppm. So you won’t taste the salt in a salt water pool as it’s not nearly as concentrated as in the ocean. By way of comparison, a human tear has a salt level of about 9,000 ppm.
Conclusion
One of the benefits of a salt water pool is the decreased use of chemical chlorine in favor of salt which is converted to chlorine using a salt water chlorinator system. You can further decrease chemical usage in your salt water pool by making use of household products like the ones listed above instead of commercially made ones.
You may want to learn more about the Salt Water Pool system in general as well as Health Benefits offered by salt water pool systems over chlorine ones.