Ascorbic Acid Treatment
This is how you use a large amount of Ascorbic Acid to treat staining in your entire pool. I cover using bulk Ascorbic acid and also using Natural Chemistry "Stain-Free" - which is Citric acid.
This is a good treatment if your pool has a lot of staining and the spot cleaning is not an option. My pool has some staining on the steps and some of the walls. It isn't severe but has been getting worse over the years. I initially was just going to use 2.2 lbs for my 17,000-gallon pool (1 lb per 10,000 gallons). After the initial treatment the stains did lighten up considerably and I could have stopped.
But I also wanted to see how the Natural Chemistry "Stain-Free" worked. It is 60-100% Citric Acid which is very similar to Ascorbic Acid only a bit weaker. It seemed to also be very effective.
So you can order bulk Ascorbic Acid online - I got mine on amazon.com for $24.95 (AmazonPrime)
You can also order bulk Citric Acid or just buy the "Stain-Free" which is effective also.
One note about the "Stain-Free" is that when I called the manufacturer to go over the instructions they were under the impression that metal ions can be filtered out with a Pulp based filter aid. However, studies have shown that Metal Ions are just too small to be filtered out once the Metal
Sequestering agents pull them out of the water and suspend them. The only effective way to remove metal from your pool water is to drain it and then refill it with non-metal containing water or to use the CuLator product I show here. CuLator has proven in a lab test to indeed trap metal ions. It is expensive but cheaper than draining your pool. The only other option is to just keep adding the maintenance dose of sequestering agents every month to keep the metals suspended. I say all this to let you know to just ignore the instructions on the back of the "Stain-Free" product.
You also will need to keep your pH below 7.8 at all times as a high pH can lead to metals dropping out and staining again. Shocking your pool can also cause this to happen.
One note on running your filter 24 hours. If you have a Sand Filter you want to set it to recirculate which bypasses the filter sand which may have some iron deposits in it and which may drop out and re-stain the pool. If you have a D.E. or cartridge filter, jut run it like normal.
A short note on the Metal Sequestering Agents shown here:
HASA Super Stain out is a combination of an organic stain remover and a Metal Sequestering Agent. The company will not disclose the ingredients but there are three and one is for metals.
I like the Jack's Magic Stuff. The Blue, Pink, Purple and Magenta stuff are all metal sequestering agents. I like the Magenta Stuff as it has a general sequestering agent in it - any of them should work in this case.
