Trying to raise ph adding 20 mule team borax

[BigDave]

Melanie,
How's your chlorine(does it keep dropping), CYA, and TA levels? How big's (gallons) your pool?
You could try mixing pool water and tap water at 1:1, 1:2, 1:4 ... until you get a clear reading to see if your pool water increases or decreases your tap water's PH.

[giroup01]

If your 5-way test kit comes with a TA test (and bromocresol indicator), do a TA test and see if the indicator turns immediately red (as opposed to green).

If it turns red immediately then the pH is less than or equal to 4.5.

[melanie612]

Hi, I never got around to posting what happened with the pool and adding borax. Here's what I did - instead of getting a five gallon bucket of my pool water I got about a gallon in a large measuring cup, then used one cup of the pool water to experiment with. I started by adding one teaspoon of borax at a time then testing. I finally got the test to the correct level. I then calculated how much that would represent in the ratio of my pool water to borax. I added 6 more boxes of borax to the pool and my PH tested 7.6 finally!!!!! I used the smaller amount of pool water b/c I thought it would be a faster method than using the 5 gallon bucket. I appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions - after that problem I had practically a worry free summer!!!!

[aylad]

I'm glad you got it back into range. Just a word of caution, though--if you have used enough trichlor to drive your pH down that far, then I'm guessing your CYA is way too high to just keep 3 ppm of chlorine in your water. Make sure you measure your CYA and use the "Best Guess Chart" here http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=365 to see how high you need to maintain your chlorine to keep from having to fight the algae again.

Janet

[CarlD]

Janet makes an excellent observation.

Since you put so much Borax in your pool, it will be worth it to get Borate test strips (They measure the Borate level--which is what Borax adds). I will speculate that your borate level is fairly high, but probably not the ideal of 50ppm.

Still one of the beneficial side effects of a high borate level is its very strong algaecide property, which may be why you haven't had an algae bloom if, as Jan suspects, your CYA is higher than we normally recommend.

Carl