How To Test For Pool Chemicals: The Essential Guide For Testing To Ensure Water Is Safe

During the summer months, there are several issues that can cause the chemical levels in your pool to become unbalanced. Thus, it is important to do the maintenance needed to balance these chemicals to ensure your pool is safe for swimming. The things that can be done to maintain well-balanced chemical levels in your pool include:

Regular Testing of PH and Chlorine

The routine testing of PH is important to ensure you don’t have problems with your system. It helps prevent issues with the level of PH becoming low, which causes your equipment to wear out quickly and problems with burning eyes, contrary to what you may believe. A few testing tips to help you keep the PH levels in your pool balanced all summer include:

PH Testing

  • Test the PH levels daily or every other day
  • Use an acid test when PH is out of balance
  • Have complete testing done monthly(testing for PH levels, mineral deposits, and solids)

Chlorine Testing

  • Check chlorine levels several times a week
  • Test for free and total chlorine levels
  • Check combined chlorine levels after treatments or shocking the pool

The testing of water’s PH level is important if you want to make sure it is well-balanced. Keeping your pool well chlorinated and regularly testing the levels will do a lot to prevent problems with the balance of the water during the summer months.

Managing Chlorine Levels During Summer Heat

The chlorine levels during the summer months are important if you want to prevent problems with algae and organisms that make your pool unsafe for swimming. Therefore, you want to consider a few things about dealing with chlorine. There are three types of chlorine levels that you need to remember when testing your pool, including:

Types of Chlorine

  • Free chlorine—This is the chlorine in the water that has not been used up or bound to contaminants yet.
  • Total chlorine—This is the total amount of free chlorine and combined chlorine.
  • Combined chlorine—The combined chlorine is the level of chlorine that has begun to bond to contaminants to neutralize them and make water safe.

These are the important types of chlorine that you need to remember when testing the chemicals in your pool. If you have recently added a shock or other chlorine treatment to the water, you should soon see the combined chlorine levels rise—meaning the treatment is doing its job.

Adding PH Treatments to Keep Pool Water Balanced

When there is a problem with PH levels, treatments might be needed to help with the balancing of pool water. This will help with preventing serious issues that begin with lower PH levels. It is just as bad to have the PH too high, which is why balancing the water in your pool can sometimes be more difficult than you might think. Therefore, you might need to increase the PH or lower it with chemical pool treatments. If there is a problem with the PH balance, you might want to call a Phoenix, AZ pool service like McCallum Pools to get help getting the levels in your pool right again.

Dealing with Algae and Cloudy Water Issues

There are also issues that cause the water in your pool to become cloudy and need to be addressed. When the water in your pool begins to become cloudy, there might be several solutions that you want to try to help deal with the problem, including:

  • Chlorine shock treatments and maintaining chlorine levels
  • Using pool clarifiers and flocculant to remove algae
  • Adding algaecide treatments to prevent algae from growing

The cloudy water issues with pool water are problems that can grow over the summer months. So, you want to deal with them quickly before they get out of control and make maintaining a chemical balance in your pool more difficult.

The basic testing of chemical levels in your pool will tell you when treatments are needed or when more severe issues need to be addressed. Visit Mccallum Pools to get a free estimate on maintenance, summer servicing, and repairs for your pool.