Lowering Calcium Hardness in Swimming Pools

When it comes to owning a swimming pool in Southern California, dealing with high levels of Calcium Hardness (CH) in the water is extremely common. We’ve found that in many parts of the Southwest United States deals with much higher levels than others but many parts of the country in some form deals with moderate to high levels of calcium in their tap water. Since this happens, if you own a swimming pool familiarizing yourself with ways to remove or lower calcium from your swimming pool as well as how to have better water quality is extremely important. We hope this blog post helps to explain why calcium can not only damage your swimming pool but why it’s so important to lower it when levels get high.

Dealing with calcium in your tap water is something you can’t control. This has everything to do with where our water is sourced and that is why it’s extremely important to familiarize yourself with the harmful effects of it. In the swimming pool industry, it’s recommended to have 200-400 parts per million (ppm) Calcium Hardness in your swimming pool but in many parts of the country, the water coming out of the tap is much higher than what is recommended! In some areas, it can start out at 400 ppm and higher!

How do high levels of Calcium Hardness affect your swimming pool?

This is a common question that we get asked and we want to let you know that when water in your swimming pool evaporates, the Calcium Hardness minerals remain in solution and gradually build up in concentration. When calcium levels exceed 600 ppm it will scale your water tile line, the interior finish, filtration equipment, decorative water features, spillways and salt chlorinators (if you own one). This can be brutal to look at and it can be extremely expensive to remove. Just this past week we were called out to a 25,000-gallon swimming pool with extremely high levels of calcium. They used our Reverse Osmosis (RO) mobile filtration trailer to recycle the water onsite. When they arrived onsite they measured the initial water chemistry:

Calcium Hardness – 890 ppm

Total Dissolved Solids – 5132 ppm

Cyanuric Acid (CYA) – 50 ppm

After filtering this swimming pool for 17 hours, they were able to leave the customer with the following:

Calcium Hardness – 130 ppm

Total Dissolved Solids – 848 ppm

Cyanuric Acid – 0 ppm

Please keep in mind, draining a swimming pool is extremely dangerous and wastes a lot of water. In many parts of the country where drought conditions are high, this service is great because it only wastes 15 – 20 % of the water. The benefits of using this system are no downtime, the interior finish is never exposed. you can swim in the pool during filtration and the water is much better than tap. Not to mention, you and your family will swim in the best water quality possible!

If you should have any questions, please contact us today!