borax in the pool

[waterbear]

This thread is a good place to start to learn about the advantages of adding borates to your water. Therer are many commercial products such as Supreme, Optimizer, Endure, Maximizer, and Salt Support that add borates to your pool. You can do the same thing with 20 mule team and muriatic acid to achieve the same thing for less money.

In a nutshell, adding borates to 50 ppm will help stabilize your pH and reduce acid demand, will reduce chlorine demand, has algaestatic properties, improves the 'feel' of the water, and makes the water 'sparkle'. (The last two are subjective but they have been reported over and over again by people who have added the borates.) They are particularly effective if you are using a SWG or clorinate with an unstabilized chlorine source such as bleach.