High CH; RO refill service in Metro Phoenix

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71ailmar

71ailmar

Silver Supporter
Dec 17, 2020
41
Mesa, AZ
Hello all,

So we are over 18 months into our new pool (2nd summer) and my CH levels are ridiculous. Got the new TF Kit-100 and CH reads at almost 1000 (useless pool store always read between 300 - 400). I've been trying to manage scale with tight pH but that is impossible to keep below 8.0 without adding acid every week.
I knew we have hard water here in Mesa (last water quality report showed average of 17GPG which equates with 290 CH for fill water) but I never thought that CH would get that high that fast. After reading plenty on here regarding CH, I see the heat/evaporation process just multiplies it substantially.

At any rate, we are thinking of exchanging the water after summer but the thought of draining almost 32,000 gallons of water and refilling is just stressful! I see there are quite a few companies that will come out for RO pool treatment and while it costs more than just emptying and refilling myself, it's worth it at this stage in the game. They mentioned they can leave the CH well below 200 which will give me more time before needing another water exchange for high CH.
Anyone used a specific company in the metro phoenix area that you'd recommend?
Any specific questions I should be asking of these companies re this service?

Thank you!
 
You’re still going to need to add a out 20% fresh water because the RO process is not 100% efficient. So about 6,400 gallons or and additional 8.6CCF on your water bill.

Everything is going to get reduced so you’ll be adding back CYA and salt. You should ask them what chemicals they plan to use to rebalance and make sure that they’re not throwing in anything you don’t want.

Going forward, you need a whole house water softener with a plumbing run hooked up to your auto fill line or else you’ll be battling this forever. Take it from me, it’s not fun. I spent over $2k on my water softener setup and I’d spend twice that amount tomorrow if I had to do it all over again. The mineral hardness of water in AZ is ridiculous and it should absolutely be building code to not allow any new homes to be built without a softener loop in the plumbing. The water here destroys faucets and hot water heaters faster than any other place I’ve lived in.
 
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Thank you for your posts, ajw22 and Joyful!
I did see some of those older threads which is what originally got me thinking about RO.

A few quotes have come in and its roughly $850-900 including rebalancing (with exception of salt, I'd need to purchase and add myself I believe). Back in early 2021 I think our bill was an extra $350 the month we initially filled....maybe now it would be $400 max, possibly.
My husband thinks we should just buy a sump pump and drain it ourselves since it would be cheaper....and the pump can be reused for future drains as needed. Obviously if we do that, we'd have to wait till end of Oct or Nov once this heat dies down. Would it be preferable to do it in winter when it's cold? I dont know, I feel like I just prefer to have someone come out and get it all done in less than 24 hours without keeping any of the pool finish exposed. We'll see....

Joyful, we do have a home water softener system that we had the home builder add (plumbed in our garage)....I take it
that it would be difficult to plumb a line to the autofill at this stage in the game?
 
If you wish to exchange your water now, follow the Exchange procedure detailed in Draining - Further Reading

Hooking up to your water softener depends on where the closest line with softened water is to your water fill input line.
I use a standalone RV water softener that must be manually regenerated. If there is any way you can hook up to your whole house softener, do it.
 
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I suggest either doing the exchange drain as @mknauss linked to above or waiting until November to drain and refill. Not sure about how the utilities work in Phoenix area but down here you do not want to drain and refill a pool in Jan/Feb/Mar because those are the months they use to calculate sewer discharge rates. So if you artificially bump up your water use, you’ll pay more all year for the sewer portion of your water bill. Because of that, most people will drain and refill in the Fall once air temps are below 85F during the day.

Your husband has it right, get a submersible and do the drain and refill yourself. It’s going to cost half of what RO charges. RO is just never economical. Your plaster will be fine as long as you drain and then immediately begin refilling. It may take a day or two but people do it all the time. Just make sure that your municipality allows you to drain into a street sewer. Some areas have restrictions on that.

As for the softener to auto fill hook up, in my case the auto fill line ran right past my garage wall so all we had to do was run a pipe out through the wall (easy) and then dog down to the auto fill and tee the line in. We move the shutoff valve and backflow preventer from the original location to the point of exit right outside the wall. The digging was the hard part but all in all it only added an extra $300 to the install. Getting a plumber out to trace the line and figure out how to do the hook up could cost a bit more after the fact. As Marty alluded to, you can use an RV water softener setup to avoid the hassles of digging and replumbing BUT that means manually filling your pool each day. That can get bothersome after a while. So it’s up to you.
 
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Are you in Phoenix proper or one of the burbs?

Some cities base the sanitary sewer charges on water usage in Jan-Mar.
Mesa does this, Chandler does not.
In Chandler, it costs less than $30 extra on your water bill to fill a 12k pool.

Check with the city for drainage restrictions. Here in Chandler, if the water cannot be maintained completely on your lot, you are required to drain to the sanitary sewer. Luckily, houses built in the last 25 years or more have easily accessible sanitary sewer cleanouts in the front yard.

If you actively manage the pH and TA, you can get/keep the CSI in the 0.00 to -0.30 range that works well for SWG and will keep scaling to a minimum. This will allow you to wait until November to do a full drain/refill - which should be way cheaper than an RO treatment.

If the water softener is in the garage, you may be able to tap into the soft water line in the garage, run it thru the exterior garage wall, run the line underground and hook up to your autofill.
 
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Are you sure you're up to 1000ppm already? My pool was filled fresh 20 months ago and my calcium is 625 now. I'm in Chandler and we have the same water source. Were you using cal hypo at any point?
 
I think here in our area they assess in Spring so I'd be fine doing the drain/fill in November.
And yes, doing a daily fill with the RV RO would get old fast.

So regarding the CH -- if all else in the pool/water balance is fine and it's just CH that is high, at what point should you drain and fill? On pool math I know it'll tell you depending on what your target is set at how much of a partial drain you should do but I dont see ourselves doing that on any consistent basis (draining, that is)....maybe once yearly we would be prone to looking at the CH level and responding as needed. I suppose it all depends on how much your willing to put up with the scale buildup?

Yesterday I add MA to bring down my pH (was between 8 and 8.2) to ~7.4
Today I re-test and it's back to 8.0
This pool LOVES that 8.0 reading and I feel I'm constantly chasing it down....all that to say, I cant really keep my SCI where I need it to be to prevent scale buildup (its not excessive in my pool but you can see it in some particular spots) so I suppose more frequent drain/fills will be needed unless we get hooked up to our softener.
 
Lower your TA to 60 and it should buy you a day or two more before you pH rises back to 8.
 
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71ailmar said:
This pool LOVES that 8.0 reading and I feel I'm constantly chasing it down...
Click to expand...
Your fill water likely has a TA of 130 ppm or so, so as you add fill water due to evaporation, you need acid to lower the TA (which is why your pH rises). I add acid about every 2-3 days to keep the TA around 80 ppm.

You might be able to put the RV water softener at your autofill line. That is what I did. So the autofill continues to work. I regen every 700-800 gallons through it. Right now that is 12 days or so.
 
Wow and I am bummed out that I am up to 600-625 CH now. I have been having issues with the salt cell scaling up, and I think it's because I am above 550 now... I need to figure out a way to hook to the softener loop or add a small one outside by the pool equipment. The way my house is plumbed it would be a long run or walls ripped out to replumb cold soft water to the autofill. I am starting to think paying someone to run the autofill around the entire house outside to the softener might be worth it. Or even buying a small softener unit and a jet pump and just putting it on the pool for 4 weeks a year or something. (Yeah, I would need to think that through).

I normally would say that I wish that someone would come up with a outdoor softener meant for pool use, but if they did that $300 unit would cost $3000.....

The other super annoying thing about AZ water, at least down here, is the high TA values... it's a challenge controlling that without going too low on pH.
 
mknauss said:
Your fill water likely has a TA of 130 ppm or so, so as you add fill water due to evaporation, you need acid to lower the TA (which is why your pH rises). I add acid about every 2-3 days to keep the TA around 80 ppm.

You might be able to put the RV water softener at your autofill line. That is what I did. So the autofill continues to work. I regen every 700-800 gallons through it. Right now that is 12 days or so.
Click to expand...
Confirmed. At least for me TA is actually worse here as an issue than the hardness is... An RV softener is an idea. I'll need to look into it.
 
Proavia and Sunnydaze, I'm so sorry, I didnt see your posts till after I posted my last message. Thank you for your replies.
In my message I alluded to some of your comments but to be specific, yep CH is between 900-1000. All this time I had been relying on my pool guys readings which were always 250 or a bit more....and pool store would come in around 400. Never paid attention till I got the TF Kit-100 and tested myself. Had to do it twice because I couldnt get over the high reading.

I believe it was mknauss who posted in a prior thread about the hardwater here in the valley possibly tripling your CH level in 12-18 month span. That is exactly whats happened in my pool. Starting CH was around 250-300 which is what our tap water is here and it's been 18 months since our initial fill.
To be fair, I wasnt following the recommended SWG chemistry balance recommendations very closely, much less looking at CSI.
I had a drop test kit that would test for FC, pH, and TA so those were the only readings I was looking at specifically but going by pool store numbers for the rest (CYA, CH, salt).
Now with the test kit I'm following everything as recommended and so far everything is good with exception of keeping that pH where it needs to be....it's like I need to add acid daily.
FC 6.5 / CC 0.5
TA 70
CYA 60
pH 8.0 (yesterday was ~7.4)
CH 900-1000
Salt 3100

I suppose when I drain and fill this time around, I will try to keep tight eyes on CSI and the recommended balancing and see if that helps reduce any scaling. Maybe do a partial drain and refill before the next summer hits just to keep the CH from climbing so high next time.
 
Highly recommend WaterTec as a company to deal with. They did my softener and the business is family owned (father passed it on to son). They do commercial and residential systems and manufacture their own tanks with Clack valves. They can do outdoor units as well.
 
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For comparison, I last drained and refilled my pool in October 2020. I installed the water softener at the same time.
My CH to start was 275 ppm. Fill water from the Colorado River.
My CH today was 400 ppm.
I do not always get to the water softener regen as quickly as I should. We leave for several weeks at a time to go cruising, etc. So that is why my CH is still creeping up, but very slowly.
 
mknauss said:
For comparison, I last drained and refilled my pool in October 2020. I installed the water softener at the same time.
My CH to start was 275 ppm. Fill water from the Colorado River.
My CH today was 400 ppm.
I do not always get to the water softener regen as quickly as I should. We leave for several weeks at a time to go cruising, etc. So that is why my CH is still creeping up, but very slowly.
Click to expand...
Marty, so if you're not necessarily keeping on top of that daily (or even weekly at times) and you still have that low of CH then doing a manual regen shouldnt be that cumbersome. I was thinking it had to be done daily. How long does it take you when you do it? I guess I'm not fully understanding how the actual process works.
 
I just did a regen this morning. It takes me about 45 minutes total. Not constant work, but overall time.

Portable Double Standard Water Softener - On The Go - Portable Water Softener

Portable Double Standard Water Softener
www.portablewatersoftener.com www.portablewatersoftener.com

That is the unit I have. They make a park model one that is bigger.
Your pool is much larger than mine.
Do you know how much water you are adding each day for evaporation?
 
71ailmar said:
Rattus, our TA here is pretty decent. The only thing I fight is the CH in the water.....and of course chasing pH.
Click to expand...
In general the TA is what causes the pH creep. The fill water here is usually no lower than 130 TA and usually 150 or so. pH is low (7.3 ish) for the high TA and CH fill level (though CH varies ALOT here depending on the month of the year as low as 100 in late spring usually, and as high as 500 in the winter). I struggle to keep the pool at 90 without getting the pH too low. I'd do borates but since the dogs think the pool is their personal water bowl, I decided not to.

My pool is half your size and in the summer I use at least a gallon a week of muriatic acid. It's my biggest expense. It's worse since the solar cover gave up the ghost, but the pool is getting used more (not enough) and it's cleaner with me not covering it. But the CH rise is much faster. I know I'd be over 1K if I hadn't religiously covered my pool the first 2 years. I just wish those covers didn't suck so badly...
 

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