Is Borax hard to find?

[PoolDoc]

Thanks for the info Anka! I do need to add a bit of a caution.

Sodium percarbonate is good for a number of things, but I need to warn that it
is NOT for pools. It is NOT compatible with chlorine!

PoolDoc

[chem geek]

Ditto. Sodium percarbonate is best used for getting rid of Baquacil/biguanide/PHMB if one wants the conversion to go faster and be less colorful than using chlorine alone to do the job. However, it costs more than using chlorine for that purpose.

Basically, sodium percarbonate is equivalent to adding sodium carbonate (i.e. "pH Up") and hydrogen peroxide with the latter being completely incompatible with chlorine (i.e. the two will annihilate each other...gently).

[CarlD]

H2O2--a colleague's brother was a rocket scientist working on H2O2 propulsion systems.... I guess it wasn't the 3% solution!

[hudson.bh]

If you are in Pittsburgh the Walmart in West Mifflin had Borax. I picked up 2 boxes even though my pool has not be installed yet.

[waterbear]

I have found that Borax is available but it often gets sold out in the locations I usually find it (Walmart, Target, Winn Dixie, and Publix) and it often is not restocked for a few weeks so I buy a box or two when I see it to make sure I have enough when I need to bump up the borates in my pool (about once a year) or bring up my pH (which I have never needed to do.) I also have often found many of the store employees are totally clueless when you ask if they have any borax and have better luck just looking through the laundry aisle myself.
There is no problem with 'stockpiling' it since it does not spoil.

[CarlD]

However, it can get rock hard! It still works, tho you have to break it up. Water will dissolve the clumps. But you'll feel them getting much warmer than the water as they dissolve--must be exothermic.

[waterbear]

Some history on Sodium Percarbonate and swimming pool:

Sodium Percarbonate WAS sold to the commercial pool industry by one company that I know of as a non chlorine oxidizer. It was discovered that it not only was not compatible with chlorine but it also messed up ORP readings that many commercial pool installations depend on to maintain properly sanitized water. (I was actually told this by the President of said company.) Said company had stopped selling it for pool use several years back and (after moving their manufacturing location across the country) now is selling phosphate removers!

There is still one company selling sodium percarbonate for pool use as a specialty product to clear a badly fouled pool. The company is Proteam (who brought us Supreme and did much of the initial research on Borax as an algaestat in their St. Augustine, FL test pools before they were bought out by Haviland.)
The product is called System Support and it actually does work but is expensive (both for the product itself and for the large amount of dry acid needed to maintain the pH, since sodium percarbonate, as chem geek said, is highly alkaline). Waste has called it the "Alka-Seltzer Treatment" which is an apt name.

I personally have used it on green swamps with all kinds of leaves and stuff at the bottom. It causes the stuff to float up so it can be easily skimmed off and can usually clear a mess like that in about 48 hours with one treatment. Since it is being used in a pool without any chlorine at the time and since the peroxide is expended there is no problem getting the chlorine to hold after the treatment in my experiences with it. IMHO, it is useful for a pool service that cannot be on hand to dump chlorine in every few hours to clear a pool and where expense is not an issue.

However, as Ben said, once you have a pool with chlorine in it (and not a nasty green swamp) there is NO valid reason to put it in a pool.

[PoolDoc]

Waterbear, that's really interesting.

It's been so long, I'd forgotten about it. But in the past I occasionally had nasty startups to do. At the time, I had access to 30% peroxide fairly cheaply in 15 gallon carboys. On a whim, I dumped an extra carboy in a nasty pool, just to see what it would do.

Fizz!

Basically, exactly the same thing as you describe happened, which was really nice. While chlorine will clean up swamps like that, it doesn't penetrate the goo layers well. The peroxide fluffed them all up so nicely, you could work with them.

I even have a vague memory of trying it with copper sulfate added first, which seemed to accelerate the fizzing.

But, I generally avoid such gooey cleanups, so it's not something I'd had occasion to think of for a number of years. However, at the homeowner level, you could use Baqua Shock, and probably cheaper than percarbonate.

PoolDoc

[giroup01]

I do think that Jack Magic's "O2 Safe Shock" is percarbonate as well, if I recall correctly.

[waterbear]

Paul,
I believe you are right about the O2 Safe Shock but Jacks Magic only lists proprietary in their MSDS so it can only be guessed at. Howver, there are many similarities between their MSDS and the ones for sodium percarbonate. Also, they caution about using it in chlorinated pools but recommend it for biquanide and ionizer pools and for oxidizing black coper stains to a more readily removed form. All this is in line with it being sodium percarbonate.