Muriatic Acid Questions

[LostboyinVA]

My Lowes carries it in the Paint Department.

[The Pool Newbie]

Niether of the Home Depots near me carry it.

Lowe's had it in the paint section.

Seems to be a pattern! I'm in Northern Virginia and Home Depot did not have it, yet Lowes did in the paint section...

[marilang]

In my area, Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH) has it near outdoor accessories - welcome mats, bird feeders, flags, doggie doors, etc. Sometimes the boxes are leaky so I go to Leslie's.

[dep78737]

For me, the pool store in the same shopping center as HD charges $1/gal less. A carton with 4 gallon jugs is ~$12 compared to 2 gallons for ~$8 at HD. Maybe the pool store does enough volume to get lower pricing and it's not a specialty item like at the home improvement/hardware stores.

[aginground]

I have been buying muriatic acid at Meijer for two summers now. My Meijer store keeps it towards the very back of the store with the paint supplies. It comes in gallon jugs for $5. Last year it always had a plastic wrapper around the gallon jug (which made it very hard to see what it actually was, unless you knew) this year they do not have the wrapper on them.

[Tomcat]

Check the concentration of that Lowes Muriatic acid. I bought a gallon once, but it was much lower than the concentration of the pool store acid for nearly the same cost. I believe the concentration is given in deg Baume, which is actually the specific gravity, but it's not a one-to-one correlation to % HCL.

All I know is the pool store HCL fumes when opened (hold your breath!) and I need very little to make a difference. The lowes stuff didn't fume and it took a lot more to move my ph.