Adding Baking Soda To Clear A Cloudy Pool
Having a pool in your house has its own perks and privileges. A small reservoir of water can make weekends and get-togethers with friends and family a little more excited. If not many of your acquaintances and loved ones have a pool, somehow, it puts a feather in your cap. Also, your kids instantly fall in love with you.
All shining things aside, pools clearly have a tendency to turn their owners into chemists, irrespective of what they do for a living. After getting a pool in your house, your primary vocation has to maintain the pool and keep it safe for the swimmers.
Periodically, you need to run tests and examinations in order to gauge and ensure the quality of the main ingredient of the pool – water. Get your gloves and safety goggles, you are officially becoming a chemist!
If you think this is too much hard work for you, we have a simple trick that can do the magic. You will be keeping the water safe for your friends and family without spending too much time checking the chemical composition of water in the pool.
Baking soda – a simple and straightforward chemical that is found in almost the kitchen of every household in the civilized world. Apart from adding taste to kitchen recipes, it can make your water clean, clear, extremely pleasurable to swim in. As an added bonus, it does not sting your eyes and does not make your dogs mat like an unwashed dog, unlike other popular pool water decontaminants.
With easy availability and no side-effects, it is not possible that baking soda has not grabbed your attention and progressed several places to become your go-to swimming pool cleaner. Read on because, in the following lines, we’ll be explaining how you can use this to get rid of polluted water in your pool forever. Using properly, it can drastically improve the quality of water. In fact, there are many benefits of baking soda ahead.
Can You Use Baking Soda To Clean Your Swimming Pool?
Even after reading the previous lines of this article, you are still in limbo. You think it is just a rumor, maybe a housewife tale to capture your imagination. So, we’ll start by dissipating rumors.
In strict terms, baking soda does not “clean” the water of your swimming pool. This would be a work of detergent or other cleaning agents. What baking soda does best is that it keeps your pool healthy by maintaining its pH. Your pool water needs to be a specific level in order to prevent damage, both to the swimmers’ health and the lining and tiles of the pool.
So, baking soda does not clean the pool but keeps the pH balance. However, baking soda scrub can be used to clean the tiles of the swimming pool. So, you can clean your pool by using baking soda but this article explores the bigger picture.
pH Levels & Alkalinity of A Swimming Pool
If you are set to clean your pool, you will be considering many factors that should be fulfilled in order to declare a pool clean and safe for swimmers. The list could go on for both visible and invisible items. While you are at it, keep in mind that the pH of water is one of the fundamental factors that you need to count to clean your pool.
If you do not know basic chemistry, pH goes from 1 to 14. When a solution shows pH between 1 to 6, it is acidic. The higher the number on the pH scale, the less acidic a solution is. On the other hand, 7 to 14 marks on pH paper would be basic or alkaline.
• When water gets acidic, it causes problems for both swimmer and the pool itself. Having acidic water in the pool leads to drying out of skin, eyes, and hair. It may cause corrosion in pool tiles and other fixtures like boards and stairs.
There are many factors that come into play while maintaining the pH of pool water. For instance, if the rain comes around 4 to 5 levels of on the pH scale, it can alter the chemistry of your pool as well. It can cause serious damage to your pool which could lead to repairing or a remodeling of your swimming pool altogether.
There are also a number of things that can alter the pH of your pool water. It includes:
• Organic Debris
• Body Fluids
• Chlorine
This stresses the importance of keeping the pH level of your pool in check to ensure the well-being of swimmers and the pool itself. Otherwise, you need to pay a hefty price for this negligence.
Since water in the swimming pool goes up in acidity at the slightest change in the balance, there are chemicals that can be used to counter this effect, such as alkalizing agents.
In simple terms, alkalinity is a rough standard that shows how much acid a sample of water can absorb. Water does this by absorbing hydrogen and turns it into neutral bicarbonate ions.
By combining both terms of acidity and alkalinity, pH levels indicate to the level of acidity in your pool water in real-time while alkalinity gauges the water’s ability to decompose that acidity into unharmful substances.
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