The importance of CYA/Stabilizer/Conditioner and how to manage it. Stabilize, conditioner, CYA, cyanuric acid are all the same thing. Understanding how to manage stabilizer in your pool, and the benefits and problems that come with stabilizer will make taking care of your pool much easier.
Stabilizer protects the chlorine in your pool from the UV rays from the sun. Without any stabilizer in the water, the sun can burn out 75% of the chlorine in your pool in one hour. In four hours it can burn all the chlorine out of your water.
we recommend maintaining 30 to 50 ppm of stabilizer in your pool water. The problem with stabilizer is the more stabilizer there is in the pool, the more chlorine it takes to effectively sanitize your water and oxidize contaminants.
We consider anything over 60 to 70 ppm of stabilizer to be problematic, anything over 100 ppm needs actions taken to lower the stabilizer. The only way to remove stabilizer, at this time, is dilution by draining and refilling all or part of the pool, or you can use alum to drop out some of the stabilizer. We are testing products that claim to remove stabilizer, but we do not have any conclusive results yet.
Stabilizer does not get used up, it does not burn up, it does not dissipate or evaporate. So when adding stabilized chlorine or straight stabilizer, the only way it goes away is by removing it through dilution from over filling, leaks in the pool, splash out, or backwashing. The stabilizer builds up over time.
Di-chlor and tri-chlor chlorines contain stabilizer. They are about 50% stabilizer by weight. so when you add a stabilized chlorine, your are adding about 1/2 of that weight in stabilizer.
To manage stabilizer we first recommend using borates in your pool at 40 to 50 ppm. This allows you to add less chlorine to maintain a proper residual, so you are adding less stabilizer. DO NOT USE STABILIZED SHOCK unless you need more stabilizer. In the off season, when the water temperatures gets below 68-70 degrees in the fall, you do not need to work so hard to maintain a constant residual of chlorine. This allows us to stop using tabs, and we can simply shock the pool once per week using a non-stabilized chlorine shock. With heavy rains and backwashing over the off season, the stabilizer levels will drop over the winter. Once the water starts warming back up into the mid 60s in the spring, then you need start having a constant chlorine residual again to prevent algae and sanitize the water.
The proper amount of chlorine that you need in a swimming pool is 7.5% of your cya level. If you keep borates in your water then you only need 5% of the stabilizer level in a chlorine residual.
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The Deep End Pool Podcast focuses on residential pool maintenance and may not cover commercial pool requirements. Please consult the CDC and local authorities regarding the code requirements for commercial pool maintenance.
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