Blog

In swimming pools and spas, calcium phosphate scale is rare. But in the right conditions, it can form scale deposits that are harder to manage (and remove) than calcium carbonate. This article explains calcium phosphate, how it forms and precipitates, and how you can prevent it.

Every year, dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa travels across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, and it is vitally important to our global ecosystem. The nutrient-rich Saharan dust, abundant in phosphorus, nourishes the ocean's phytoplankton and algae, while also acting as a natural fertilizer for the lush Amazon rainforest. That same dust also gets into swimming pools.

It's a common belief that bright, sunny days lead to more chlorine loss in swimming pools than cloudy, rainy days. But is this really the case? We set out to investigate this theory. This article explains what UV does to chlorine, and the impact of clouds and cyanuric acid on chlorine photolysis.

For swimming pool owners and service professionals, understanding the role of Cyanuric Acid (CYA) goes beyond its basic function of protecting chlorine from sunlight degradation. This article explores the role of cyanurate alkalinity as a pH buffering system and how it influences the overall water balance.

In this article, we explain how alkalinity buffers pH. We focus specifically on the significance of pK_a values in water chemistry and how they impact the buffering capacity against changes in pH. 

Chlorine products have different pH values when dissolved in water, but their impact on the pH of a swimming pool is not always significant. This article discusses how each chlorine type impacts pH and why.

In our last article, we introduced the concept of the Mole, a unit of measurement that allows us to weigh atoms, ions, and more complex molecules. This article expands on that lesson to demonstrate how to read product percentages listed on chemical labels. In particular, we're focused on Chlorine %.

In this article, we will discuss the significance of the mole in chemistry and how it is applied to chemical reactions and products.

This article will outline six bad habits that you can change immediately–for free–that will give you an immediate return on investment (ROI).

This article discusses how to manage a pool when the source water is scale-forming (≥ +0.31 LSI). This could mean the water has high calcium hardness, high total alkalinity, high pH, or any combination of the three.

Traditional pool industry teachings tell us that maintaining the pH within the ideal range of 7.4 to 7.6 is crucial for swimming pools. But why? And is there actually an ideal pH in the first place? Let's find out.

A "hot start" is a method for starting up a new or resurfaced pool using a lot of acid. It is extremely aggressive–by design–so it etches calcium off the surface, hopefully evenly. The objective of a hot start is to "burn up" plaster dust and any imperfections left behind by the plaster application process, so that the customer is left with a beautiful looking pool. A hot start may also be called a "zero alkalinity startup" or an "acid startup". This article will discuss what hot starts are, why they are used, how they are done, and the chemistry behind the process.