i'll show you how to add borax your pool to raise the ph in your water if you test your water and you notice your ph is low this one here is about 7.0 you want to raise it up and i would probably raise this one up to about 7.4 you can even raise it to 7.6 you can use the borax to do that i guess you want to get a good test kit like this one here it's a taylor k2005 and you want to run a ph test on it that line is a 44 milliliter line take the r4 tester we want to put five drops in here to get a reading i'm gonna put the cover on the kit shake it up a little i'm gonna give you the ph reading that's about 7.0 roughly and one of the benefits of using the borax is that you can raise your ph up slowly soda ash tends to raise it up pretty rapidly and also the alkalinity the borax won't affect the alkalinity nearly as much as a soda ash so it's harder to make a mistake when you're adjusting your ph up with the borax and you can find this brand in your local grocery store usually in the laundry detergent aisle make sure you get the pure borax without any kind of additives to it you see that the 20 mule team borax is sodium tetraborate and that's all that's in here now we want to fill our test kit up to 25 milliliter line and we want to do an alkalinity test the alkalinity level affects how much borax adds to your pool so the higher the alkalinity the more of the product you have to add to raise the ph to lower the alkalinity less of the product two drops of r7 swirl that around a little bit five drops of the r8 roll that around now i'm going to add the r9 i'm going to count how many drops it is then i'll give my alkalinity reading add a drop and i'm going to swirl it each time i'm going to keep going until the color changes and doing the same thing i had to drop counting it and swirling it each time let me turn let me turn around so you can actually see the color change here when i get to the final drop see it's starting to change there there we go so the alkalinity here is actually at 90. it's actually in a really good range way to calculate this is to go on your computer or your iphone and go to the pool calculator and go ahead and get the reading from that website is actually very accurate this pool is about 17 000 gallons fiberglass pool i'm going to raise the ph from 7.0 to 7.4 for the alkalinity number which is 90. then i'll go ahead and go to calculate and it'll tell me to add 107 ounces of or six pounds six pounds of the borax or 111 ounces here if the alkalinity was 130 i'm gonna go ahead and calculate you would have to actually add nine pounds four ounces of the product 148 ounces so it does matter the alkalinity is a factor in the how much borax as you pull the raised ph i'm going to go ahead and add one whole box this is a four pounds 12 ounces so it's almost a five pound box i have almost 10 pounds of borax right here you can pour it in the skimmer slowly make sure the pool is running of course i'm gonna go ahead and pour one whole box in i'm gonna take the measuring cup i'm gonna go ahead and pour another 16 ounces in one more pound of the borax that'll make almost six pounds of the product so i'm gonna pour that in right now again make sure everything is running again i'll check the ph later and see if that raised it up and you can see here that this one is about 7.4 now so by adding the borax to the pool letting it run a cycle it will raise the ph up using the borax razor ph is probably the easiest and safest way to raise your phf and your poor spa