Is well water good for pools? How to treat a pool filled with well water? Find out the answers to these questions and more pool maintenance tips. Read here!
If you happen to live in the rural areas and you have a pool, then you probably have experience filling it up with well water from drilled wells. While most wells are maintained regularly, well water does contain a lot of metals and minerals. That’s why it’s not unusual for well water to have high levels of copper, iron, and calcium.
Due to this though, your pool may become cloudy and murky. What’s more is that the minerals and metals can stick to your hair and body.
It’s for those reasons that pools filled with this kind of water need to be treated. In this guide, we’ll show you how to treat a pool filled with well water.
Contents
Can A Pool Be Filled With Well Water?
Now, most people may ask can a pool be filled with well water? Can it be done and is it really a problem?
Well, we did mention above that the metals and minerals cause the pool to be brown and murky. They also can stick to you and cause some skin irritations.
Another issue with using well water is that it is usually shared among the residents. If your pool is pretty big, then you need to use up a lot of water. This will present a problem if you need to refill your pool every so often when your pool water turns brown.
That’s why knowing how to clear up a pool filled with well water is really important so you don’t need to keep on refilling.
With that in mind, we can start with the steps:
How To Treat A Pool Filled With Well Water?
1. Test The Pool
The first step in treating a pool filled with well water is to simply test it first. You need to test the pool water for pH and chlorine. This can be done via a four-way strip test. Just put the strip into the pool and results will show in around 3 minutes. You can see the pH, alkaline, and chlorine levels through the strip.
2. Fix The pH Levels
Next, you need to fix the pH levels with the results as your basis. Remember, the pH needs to be balanced so depending on the reading, you need to either increase or decrease it to get symmetry. To increase the pH level, simply put soda ash to the pool. To decrease the pH level, put a mix of muriatic acid and water.
3. Fix The Alkaline Levels
Once the pH is already fixed, the next thing to adjust is the alkaline levels. The best way to do this is to simply add some baking soda. This will increase alkalinity. If it is too high, decrease it by adding the muriatic acid and water mixture we gave above.
4. Fix The Chlorine Levels
When that’s done, you also need to fix the chlorine levels. Again, refer back to your test strip results and add some liquid chlorine until the chlorine levels balance out. If there is too much chlorine, then you just need to add some chlorine neutralizer in the pool.
5. Chelate The Pool
Chelating the pools will take out the metals. Sequestering agents do this by simply putting all the metals together in a few spots so that they’re easy to remove. Once the metals are lumped in several spots, use your pool vacuum to clean them out.
6. Do The Final Test
The last thing to do is do the final test. This is to ensure that the chlorine, alkaline, and pH levels are properly balanced. If they are, then you can take a dip and enjoy yourself.
Friendly Reminders
Before we end, we’re going to leave a few friendly reminders to take note of when you do this.
Check them out below:
- When mixing muriatic acid with water, make sure that the acid to water ratio is always 1:10.
- You can usually fix the pH and alkaline levels together since they both need the same balancing agents.
- If you will use chlorine neutralizer to decrease chlorine levels in the pool, the measurements are 6 ounces of chlorine neutralizer per every 10,000 gallons of water
- Do not shock the pool before adding the chelating agent. Chelate the pool and remove the metals before the pool shocking.
Conclusion
And that, my dear readers, is how to treat a pool with well water. We recommend that you treat the pool regularly to make sure that you don’t need to replace it with new well water. You see, maintenance treating is much easier on the pool than treating newly filled well water. So, make sure that you follow our steps so that you don’t need to suffer from metals or minerals sticking to you.
We hope that you enjoyed our little guide on how to treat a pool filled with well water.
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