[Music] [Music] hi welcome to the pool guy podcast show today i'll be joined by bob lowery who's a renowned expert in chemistry and we're going to talk about cyanuric acid we're going to cover everything about cyanuric acid from why it's called stabilizer or conditioner all the way to the effect it has on chlorine in the pool it will give you all the ins and out of cyanuric acid in this podcast pool service pro open a leslie's wholesale account today and receive wholesale pricing on products you use every day lesley's pool supply offers convenient locations that are open seven days a week another great benefit of opening a leslie's wholesale account is leslie's referral program get referred to a customer looking for weekly pool service also receive priority service enhanced rebate programs a discount on your general liability insurance through spa a discount on your pool writing software through skimmer and an opportunity to co-brand with leslie's on your social media website truck and more save time and money and grow your pool service route and become a leslie's pro let's have you introduce yourself what's new over there is there anything happening as most of you know by now i'm semi-retired living in lima peru do you want to talk about my career a little or just yeah you can talk about a little bit of your highlights of your career well in my career in the pool industry which is now 48 years i have owned two chemical companies and a publishing company i've written 21 books on pool chemistry developed a little more than 100 products chemical products for pool and spa use i have been a cpo instructor for 21 years i have written five apps for phones for pool use i've written probably 30 or 40 technical bulletins on various subjects and a lot of the current cya debate and using borates and pool and using aeration to raise ph has probably been promoted and and made a huge awareness in the last five to eight years largely because of me and uh it's okay i have gone from being a nobody and a maverick in a who the hell is he to be in uh i think he knows what he's doing to people are sometimes now saying i'm the master the godfather or a genius so i'm not sure whether i'm a nobody or a genius but i do know water probably better than practically anybody you can think of so and i'm also independent so i don't have a an axe to grind and i don't have a a company telling me what i got to say yeah and i think that's what makes you know you you're so unique in the industry is that you don't have anyone with their thumb over you and that brings us to the subject of the cy debate now there's some that say that what we can first meant talk about what exactly is cyanuric acid one question i get all the time is why is it referred to as conditioner or stabilizer besides using that using the chemical name the cyanuric acid name why is in the industry we call it a conditioner or a stabilizer cyanuric acid by the way was was brought to the pool industry in in 1956 and shortly thereafter they chlorinated it and made it into a granular and then eventually compressed it into a tablet and a tablet became a great thing but cyanuric acid is was a great thing in the beginning they thought that the only thing that it did was it slowed down the uv or sunlight degradation of chlorine in water and chlorine if you just put liquid chlorine or straight chlorine into water and make the killing form of chlorine then the degradation of that is about 75 in two hours and then in the next two hours it's 75 percent of that so you can see that pretty much in four hours the chlorine is gone in in the in the 1950s if you had a pool guy that serviced your pool he came to your pool every day because the chlorine he put in yesterday was gone pool guys couldn't take care of too many pools because they had come to your pool every day and so there wasn't a thing like a weekly call but as soon as they developed cyanuric acid introduced it started selling it as a as a dispenser for chlorine it took off like a jet and became the most popular chlorine in the in the industry and probably still is to this day in the beginning it caught the rest of the chlorine manufacturers unaware and as a result there was all kinds of rumors going around in the 50s and 60s and continue to this day that it will lock up all of your chlorine and so that your chlorine won't work at all and you can get cancer from it and i mean there's just been one thing after another to to to try to displace it i think the competitors started most of that but um in any case um those rumors still persist but now that we have better technology better understanding and and better methods of testing and things we've been able to dig into this a little bit deeper but the fact is that that we call this product a stabilizer a conditioner because it stabilizes chlorine against uv degradation and in fact using as little as 30 parts per million of cyanuric acid in the water will keep the chlorine in the pool eight times longer than without it and so that is huge you know if we're talking about chlorine being gone in in one day in a regular pool and if you had cyanuric acid in the pool it would last a week eight times longer so it it is a a magic chemical from that standpoint but what we overlooked because i went back and looked at the information since about the mid-1970s we have known that cyanuric acid and chlorine actually bond together in the pool and there's only a very small percentage of the chlorine that is not attached to cyanuric acid and it doesn't mean that when it's attached to it it it's not available what it means is that the amount of chlorine that is available in the water is is in an equilibrium and even though it's a small amount when some of that chlorine that's free gets used some of the chlorine that's bound to cyanuric acid instantaneously converts over to the killing form of chlorine it's like it's not all available right now but all of the chlorine that's in your pool is always will be available until there's none of it left but the percentage is very small the percentage even at at around 30 to 50 parts per million of cyanuric acid only three percent of the chlorine is available 97 of the chlorine that's in the water is bound to cyanuric acid provided you've got more than 30 parts per million of cyanuric acid in the pool if you get up to about a hundred parts per million of cyanuric acid there's only two percent of your chlorine that's available and god forbid that you should get up to 150 or 200 parts per million because then there's only about one percent of your chlorine that's available i think that points out the next part that i was going to ask you is the cyanic acid level is probably the number one factor on the effectiveness of coriander pool is that correct that's right the rate of killing the speed and the duration of killing is all controlled by the synaric acid and it's a good thing but too much of it is a bad thing so we need some to protect chlorine from sunlight and so on but we also need to understand that it's not just a chemical that protects chlorine from sunlight it it is a a buffer and it's actually quite a good buffer against the ph going down so it's a good buffer in the water to keep the ph from going down so it acts in conjunction with the alkalinity in the pool which is also a buffer and it the total alkalinity keeps the ph from going down and so those two are the buffer system uh against ph going down we know if you've studied a little bit you know that there is a an adjustment that needs to be made to the langolier saturation index because of cyanuric acid and in general terms you take one third of of cyanuric acid and subtract it from the total alkalinity reading to get what we call carbonate alkalinity and this is what we use when we calculate the saturation index i think it's important to note too then that cyanuric acid not only affects the chlorine but again you mentioned it's a buffer to ph so the reason why you need to do the adjusted alkalinity it affects more than one part of the water it controls the killing it controls the it controls the ph from it going down and it keeps chlorine from being destroyed by sunlight so it is it does a number of things that we that we really didn't think about when they originally put it in the pool back in the 50s and 60s yeah and i think one of the things that is surprising in this era is that there's really no effective way to eliminate it or reduce the level except partially or fully draining the pool i know that there are some chemicals on the market bioactive and natural chemistry have a cyanuric acid reducing chemical and i know that rudy stinky which talks about using aluminum sulfate to reduce the level but you know as far as science goes and as far as the chemicals that will counter cyanuric acid is draining the pool the only way to actually get rid of it it's it's probably the the cheapest fastest and most effective way is just to drain some of the water and fill it back up and because tap water doesn't have any cyanuric acid in it we we can pretty much drain whatever percentage of the pool we need to get back down to 250. so if you have a hundred in your pool you want to get to 50 you drain 50 percent of the water and fill it back up and you'll be at 50. so that's the most effective but you can use alum and what they've said is that a percentage which is strange but because most chemicals you add an amount and you get an expected precipitate or an expected amount that comes out of the water and it's on a molecular basis it's one for one so we're able to to calculate that but people are saying that you know they're no matter where they're starting cyanuric acid is they put alum in and 50 of it's gone and i just i find that a strange a strange thing as a chemist that that happens but um nonetheless it does appear to to lower cyanuric acid some but then you end up with a alum and the precipitate of cyanuric acid on the bottom of the pool and you're going to be adding something like eight pounds for each 10 000 gallons of alum to the pool so if you've got a 20 000 gallon pool you're going to put in 16 pounds of alum and then you're going to put in it's going to precipitate another 8 pounds of cyanuric acid and so you're going to have 24 pounds of stuff on the bottom of the pool and it doesn't because the alum makes what we call a flock the flock is um like a feather in air it's the same thing it's kind of a a very light uh spread out leaf looking thing that that is in the bottom that that only it takes hours to settle you put the elem in the pool and mix it up and then let it settle for something like 12 hours and once uh at the end of 12 hours in the bottom of the pool you've got about six inches of stuff in the bottom of the pool and then you need to vacuum that to waste and you have to vacuum it very slowly because if you move the vacuum very quick it resuspends the the alum flock and so you don't get it sucked up into the vacuum so you have to vacuum very slowly well when you vacuum very slowly you know you may end up losing a you know 800 or a thousand gallons of water out of your pool just from vacuuming because you have to vacuum the waste and then there's one concern that someone has raised and i'm not one of them but someone has said it that it leaves aluminum in the pool there is a an epa drink a drinking water standard on the amount of aluminum in pools because they think it has something to do with with alzheimer's and dementia so um at any rate uh it does there's a potential to leave some aluminum in the pool i think the bottom line is that draining and refilling is probably the safest and most effective still so well you can see how much work it is to use alum and you know if you're going to drain your pool you either either set your pool uh equipment onto waste or you know you put a pump in it and pump some of it out and you're done you don't have to you don't have to add the alum and mix it up and vacuum the waste and do all that stuff so and then when you're done with alum you end up having to readjust your alkalinity and your ph because it changes it yeah and i would say you know that's that makes it more complicated for sure and one thing i think is pretty well known in the industry may not be known by everybody but the fact that cyanuric acid does not evaporate out of the pool when you lose water so it just stays in the pool that's why the level keeps increasing and one thing that i've recently was brought to my attention someone posted this in in my group and it was originally i think on the random blog and it's by richard falk and the quote goes something like this i'll read part of it or maybe all of it it says also in all pool using pools using cya chlorine slowly oxidizes cy itself at normal warm pool temperatures you see why loss is around three parts per million per month and it takes 2.5 parts million free chlorine to oxidized one part per million of cya some pools show higher loss mostly due to high temperature and higher ph that accelerates this reaction you know based on this quote by him is it accurate to say that the chlorine can oxidize see why at higher temperatures it does but the amount of the amount is small enough that it it's it's probably not even something you can measure you know you're looking at maybe at maybe 5 ppm a month in the summer when you're using the pool and you've got a higher chlorine level yeah and and so it's really not very much at all and and you know especially if you're using trichlor you're putting back more than that every week anyway you know you know in a typical pool you're probably putting 20 to 30 parts per million of cyanuric acid into the pool every month in the in the summer and if the degradation is only five you know you're you're far behind what could do and i i looked into seeing if we could actually run the chlorine level up high enough that it would kill off the cyanuric acid level and i went all the way up to 200 parts per million of chlorine and it still didn't wipe out the cyanuric acid so it's a pretty hardy molecule cyanuric acid wasn't invented in 1956 it was actually discovered in the ground in around 1900 around cattle you know cattle when they they poop on the ground it contains some some chemicals that are similar to fertilizer and fertilizer is kind of one of the starting chemicals to make cyanuric acid so in the stomach of a of a cow they actually make cyanuric acid to a small degree to a small degree i'm not saying that that's where they get it but um uh yes so it's not that but so and that of course raises the question where somebody said it was was uh cancer-causing and caused the industry to go crazy around 1980 and they had to repeat a lot of the tests to prove to everybody that cyanuric acid was not cancer-causing yeah so i think back to that quote i think the dilution probably you know from evaporation because you do add fresh water to the pool evaporation doesn't lose any cyanuric acid but because evaporation is like distillation only a lot slower and so when the water evaporates only pure water evaporates all the calcium and sodium and everything that's in the pool stays there and then when you add more water it stays there again so all the stuff in the pool keeps building up that's why your tds builds up and your cyanuric acid builds up because you keep you know using the cyanuric acid and adding more and it keeps building up the only thing that loses cyanuric acid or any other uh constituent that's in the pool is water loss and water loss of course can be from from a leak or splash out or drag out or filter back washing but aside from that unless there's a water loss you're not you're not lowering cyanuric acid and so a little trick that we do out here in california is a lot of customers have a host spigot on their equipment on their pump when the builder installs the pool they put that on there when they pressurize everything they leave them on there they don't take them off so we use that we're at a stop and we'll turn that on with the pump running and drain the water as we're there and then the autofill kicks in putting fresh water in so that's probably a fairly effective way if you do 10-15 minutes of that every week to kind of get fresh water in the pool and dilute the cyanic acid yeah that's that's a great way i'm a big advocate of just replacing water it's better for everything not just cyanuric acid but um and i used to tell people listen you know there are so many sand filters back then just tell people listen you're gonna back wash the filter anyway once or twice a month why don't you just leave it on for an extra 10 minutes you know and let the food let the pool fill back up and do that you know every other time you go do that and you'll eventually get cyanuric acid down and and or at least uh at least keep it from going up yeah that makes perfect sense now i think another thing that we hear a lot about in the industry and i get this from a lot of people that have done an acid had done a drain of a pool and a chlorine wash but not an acid wash per se and then you know cyanuric acid level maybe was at 200 or unreadable at some point and then they refilled the pool up they don't put any cyanuric acid back in any conditioner back in and they test the water and it's like at 80 or 100 parts per million still now does the cyanuric acid stay in the plaster is that is that you know i've heard that for many years and i have i've never actually been able to to confirm it myself because in order to do that you would actually need to do what's called a core sample in the pool where you actually take a circular piece of of the pool out and then go take it to the laboratory and and put it under a microscope or see if you can see if you can find some cyanuric acid in there and nobody wants you to do that to their pool you know so um and then a lot of labs uh are not used to testing for uh cyanuric acid so taking a core sample to a lab and saying check it for cyanuric acid they might now may not even know what that is it's difficult to to find a place that'll do it and then somebody's got to pay for it and i guess no you know it's not yes not scientific but i hear people all the time saying you know i drained this pool we gave it a chlorine wash or an acid wash and filled it back up and a week later the cyanuric acid was at 50. you know and i hear that a lot and i don't know you know the pool is a system so in addition to the pool there's plumbing and there's a filter and there's equipment and the you know could be in the equipment as well could be in the filter i don't know it i have heard for years and so did my my friend uh uh greg garrett who was a a super expert as i am in water he was in in pool surfaces and he used to say that that cyanuric acid gets into the plaster and when you fill the pool back up the cyanuric acid comes back out and i i don't doubt that but i have no idea how much of it is in there um nobody has actually proven that to my satisfaction anyway there was a test done where they took a some what they they call a coupon where they make a little test sample of plaster you know a couple inches square and they hang them into a thing like a fish tank only the waters circulating and flowing and they put cyanuric acid in there and then leave it there for some number of months and then analyze the little coupon to see if there's any cyanuric acid in there and i looked at that test and i i found a bunch of as we say a bunch of holes in the method uh to me the method was not uh indicative of a regular pool the levels were all wrong but there was an amount of time and then they looked to see if there was cyanuric acid and then they point to this this uh report as being the finite answer that that you know cyanuric acid doesn't doesn't get into plaster and you know one test negates all the people in the field saying that it does i just don't buy that you know i i think the someday we will get to a point where somebody's going to to remodel their pool and we can break up some of the pool and go analyze it and see if there's any cyanuric acid in it but we need at least some detail of how long they've been using cyanuric acid and and what the levels have been so we get some idea you know if they've had 200 parts per million or 50 or something it you know at least we get some idea of how much might be in there we should also point out that cyanuric acid is an acid and when you have the granular form you introduce it to the skimmer and you're supposed to not put it directly on the surface and i should point out that you have created probably my favorite chemical which is the liquid conditioner and i love that stuff i don't like the granular for many reasons one if the filter has like a cartridge filler has hold it it'll blow back into the pool two you have to run the pool for 24 hours and people don't like that three could clog the plumbing i have guys clog plumbing all the time introducing that and so your liquid you know pool conditioner i think natural chemistry is the holder of that right now right for you and i invented that and and then i i sold the mark the manufacturing rights to a company to make it and then i sold the marketing rights to natural chemistry so i kind of double dipped on that when i i i didn't want to start a company and start making it myself so i found a company to make it and then i sold the marketing rights to natural chemistry and actually bob kopperger from natural chemistry didn't see the need for it and didn't didn't think it would be a very big chemical and of course i think now it's their number one best-selling chemical but um and bio lab wanted it for many many years and couldn't get it so they eventually bought natural chemistry and now they own it that's funny but to tell you the truth it is my favorite because you just pour it in the pool not to worry about any kind of bad side effects with adding cyanuric acid and for all those listeners out there with a vinyl or fiberglass pool i think it's the perfect way to add cyanuric acid for any pool for that matter even for a pool startup it's the safest way to add the cyanuric acid so a little shout out for your product well you know some of the cyanuric acid that we used to use um you could put it on a pool in california you could throw it into a pool just broadcast it and it would sit on the bottom of the pool for four or five days you know and and that certainly is not any good for the the plaster surface because it is an acid uh it takes four or five days and as i used to say in the meantime your your chlorines being killed by the sunlight you know 75 percent every two hours till that cyanuric acid dissolves so i hope you found this podcast helpful i've done a number of podcasts with bob lowry covering all the other aspects of pool water chemistry to find those podcasts you can definitely go to my website and then on the banner click on the podcast icon it'll take you to the site and you can scroll down or you can just go ahead and type in the search box bob lowry and all the podcasts i recorded bob lowery will pop up if you're interested in his certified residential course you can go to his website pcti.online and that'll take you to the list of courses that he's that they're doing in person and also online and you can read some of bob's tech bulletins while you're on his website if you're interested in enhancing your business definitely consider my coaching program to learn more at my website swimming4learning.com by clicking on the coaching icon or you can go to poolguycoaching.com to learn more about my coaching program thanks for listening to this podcast regress for a week and god bless pool service pro open a leslie's wholesale account today and receive wholesale pricing on products you use every day leslie's pool supply offers convenient locations that are open seven days a week another great benefit of opening a leslie's wholesale account is leslie's referral program get referred to a customer looking for weekly pool service save time and money and grow your pool service route and become a leslie's pro