How to raise pH level in a pool
I have three brothers, one of whom lives close enough to New York City that I can visit him on a weekend bike ride. Conveniently (especially in the hot, muggy summers) he’s the brother who owns a house with a pool. He is also a professor of chemistry at a renowned university. While both of his kids (and all of the neighborhood kids) love his pool, he has more of a love-hate relationship with it and tends to complain about the maintenance going on for his in almost every conversation we have throughout the summer maintenance is required. He also spends a lot of time talking about his pool’s chemistry (he always tended to talk about chemicals), particularly pH balance.
A pool’s pH level indicates how acidic or alkaline the water in it is. PH stands for “Potential Hydrogen” or how well a substance attracts hydrogen. The standard pH scale ranges from 0-14, with 0 being the most acidic. An optimal pH range is between 7.2 and 7.6.
Too much acid in your water is bad for your pool and skin; too little leads to deposits and cloudy water. Scale refers to the coarse, brownish stains that form on pool walls and are caused by the solidification of calcium carbonate. Imbalanced pH also nullifies the power of your chlorine to keep germs out of your swimming area.
How to increase pH in a pool
Low pH is often caused by rainwater and debris getting into the pool. The easiest way to raise the pH in a pool is to add sodium carbonate (soda ash) or sodium bicarbonate (baking soda).
Measure your pH
Use a water test kit
The first step is to test your pool’s chemistry with a test kit.
The Lupo Global test kit contains accessories for up to 100 individual tests. To use, fill the comparator — a plastic piece with two test-tube-like channels and pH, chlorine, and bromine indicator lines — with water from your pool (or wherever you want to test). Bromine acts similarly to chlorine, acting as a disinfectant, oxidizer, and algae killer.
Add five drops of pH indicator solution from the bottle provided. Attach the cap ends and mix. Match the color the water changes to to the corresponding color/level on the comparator. Results come in seconds.
Pool and Spa Test Strips
These pool and spa test strips from JNW offer another method of testing the pH as well as other chemicals in your water. Each kit comes with 100 strips that test for 7 different parameters: hardness (amount of dissolved calcium and magnesium present), chlorine level, bromine, free chlorine, pH, cyanuric acid (stabilizer) and total alkalinity. To use, simply place a strip in water for a few seconds, gently remove and shake off excess liquid, then compare the colors on the strip to the chart printed on the test strip vial.
These strips are great as they also show if the chlorine and calcium levels are where they should be or not. Both have the potential to affect pH.
Calculate the amount of water
Once you have determined the pH of the water in your pool, calculate the number of gallons using the formulas below (math is fun and sometimes useful).
Length x width x depth x 7.5 = X gallons.
Diameter x diameter x depth x 5.9 = X gallons.
Add sodium carbonate
To raise the pH by 0.2 points in 10,000 gallons of water requires 6 ounces of sodium carbonate (soda ash). For example, if your pool holds 25,000 gallons of water and your pH is 7.0, you should raise it to at least 7.2 — or 0.2 points. To determine the amount of soda to add, multiply 2.5 (25,000 divided by 10,000) x 6, which equals 15 ounces.
Soda comes in a variety of sizes. My brother has some 15 pound buckets of this stuff in his garage. Soda is also used as a color activator in textiles, increasing color saturation when dyeing clothes—if that’s your thing.
Mix and add to the pool
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Fill a five-gallon bucket with clean water and mix in the ash, then pour it around the edges of the pool. Make sure your pump is running to keep the soda ash circulating.
Wait about an hour and test again. If your pH is where you want it to be, then you’re done. If not, you have to repeat the process. The water may be a little cloudy after adding the soda ash, but it should be clear in a few hours.
pool maintenance
To keep your pH where it should be, scoop out leaves and debris every day if possible, and test chemical levels weekly. Also, do a good monthly cleaning and vacuuming.
If, like me, you’re lucky enough to have a good friend or sibling who has a pool, you can let them do all the chemistry and just enjoy the swim and cool off on a hot afternoon. If you are the owner of this pool, you will have to deal with pH levels at some point. The good news is that raising pH isn’t all that difficult; Plus, it gives you something to complain about when your freeloading sibling shows up for a bath.