The Pool Guy Podcast Show

Pool Stains Part 1 - Rust Stains and Organic Stains & How to Treat

August 13, 2018 David Van Brunt Season 2 Episode 57
The Pool Guy Podcast Show
Pool Stains Part 1 - Rust Stains and Organic Stains & How to Treat
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode I talk about Rust Stains in your pool and also Organic Stains and give you some tips on how to identify and treat them.

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Speaker 1:

Sure.

Speaker 2:

Hi. Welcome to this week's episode with. I'm going to be talking about cool stains and all the different ways you can treat them and identify the stains that you find in your pool. This week's podcast is brought to you by a new post icon in your pool, so it's been helping us find the right pool, parse the 2001 with over 50,000 parks and stuff online today and had the parts delivered right to your door. The podcast is also brought to you by rip tide pool vacuum system. The rip tide is a powerful vacuum system that picks up large debris at the bottom of your pool rapidly. It should be great. We do pool service for a living or if you're a homeowner and either that or an area where you pool gets a lot of debris in it each week because they're more about the rip tide pool vacuum system at www. That rip tide back that come with this podcast. I'm going to cover the common pool stains and you'll find in your poll. I'll also touch on modeling of the pool surface self and I will talk about metal staining. Uh, let's see how far I get in this podcast, covering all the different stain types and the treatment may need to break it into another podcast, maybe part one and part two. And I'm also gonna do a podcast on scaling and the pool surface and different ways to treat that. So stay tuned for that one also. So let me jump right in and talk about pool stains. So one of the most common pool saved you're going to find in your pool is probably a resting. This could happen from a number of reasons. Just today on my route, I was servicing a pool. They had a party of some kind and one out of the pool was a nerf gun and I kind of knew what I moved the gun that there'd be underneath. Ensure enough there was probably a good three inch by half an inch. Rusting writes and reads a nerf gun. And because of the state, of course the NERF gun is not made for the pool. It's made for outside the pool. I'm a typical water gun that you would have in your pool super soaker or any other guy would float because they're made that way, but a nerf gun courses I made for the pool, so it sank to the bottom and if you have a nerf gun, if you have kids, there are screws holding the nerf gun together. So I don't know how long the nurse goes in the pool. I suspect it was in there since Saturday. That's three days ago. I was there today on Tuesday, so by leaving the nerves get in the pool for three days. The fool has sustained now and it's very common. Anything that's metal it goes into the pool, will has a stain and another customer that the kids are playing with a 10 pound weight. I don't know why they did this, but it was not 10 pound plastic, weight it a 10 pound iron type weight and they left it on the bottom of the pool and it took me a long time to get it out there and as a side story, but I had to use my full brush, push it over to the shallow end because I could not skim their thing up with my net, which is too heavy. When I got into the shallow end, I saw that they had a regular a shovel on the deck and they were doing for the gardening work, so I got to shovel and I actually scooped the 10 pound weight up to the first step of the pool. Then I reached in and grabbed it and got that 10 pound weight out. It's not easy to do, but it left a big stain on the bottom of the pool, of course, where it was sitting in the circular pattern. Bobby pins or hairpins, very common to see those inspires your. They'll use a spa and then don't leave the hairpin, the hairpin of fall out into the water and it will remain in the spa for a long period of time of the week or a few days in Italy. The stain and more similar to what the bobby pin looks like on the bottom of the pool. I remember one time my son's bathing suit wasn't fitting well, so I've put a pin in it and it went through his bathing suit, but the clothes pin fill out at some point to notice it and then when I went out to my spy, saw the clothes pin in there the next day I got it out and of course it was a rusting underneath the clothes pin, so to be safe, any kind of metal object, keep it away from the pool. I find a lot of hot wheel cars and the pools, I find a lot of regular car toys with the metal rods to the wheels and the pool. I'm just about anything that's made to stay on the land is not made to be in a pool. The pool specific toys without meddling him, so stick with those, but um, if you have a pool, you're probably going to have this happen to you at one point or another. Uh, another arrest form of resting means are the fertilizer pellets at the gardeners used. And I run into this all the time. This is very common. They'll sprinkle the pellets with their hand, it'll go onto the pool deck and then they'll get their blower and blow all the pellets into the pool or around the area. And I get there the next week and I find a small little bb type stains all around the perimeter of the pool. And these are very hard to eliminate in there from the fertilizer pellets themselves. Don't burn the plaster. So another common type stain as her later fertilizer pellets. Then you have your tricor tablet burn. It looks almost like Arestin in some cases. Um, if you have a floater in your pool and the Florida cracks or gets knocked over in a tap of spills out in, it stays in the pool for a few days. It'll actually burn the plaster or fiber glass. And I don't recommend using tablets and a fiberglass or vinyl pool for this reason. Um, it'll burn a good, nice mark, half moon black and then around it will be like a resting. And that's from the acid that's in the tribe or tablet, the eric acid burn that. And speaking of signed acid, if you use the granular cyanuric acid, I can't tell you how many times that I've run into this or got a question where someone would buy a five pound bucket of the granular conditioner sign eric acid and no sprinkle it in their pool because the person at the pool store said, oh, just sprinkle it around the perimeter. It will be fine. And that's an acid. That's why they call it signed eric acid, even though it's designed to protect the chlorine in your pool from being burned out. Um, is it acid? So it'll stay in your pool. Several there too. Sometimes the tablet burn, you'll see little marks all over the bottom of the pool from the sign eric acid, another sign, eric acid burn type is if you put five pounds of senior skimmer the correct way. And you, when you pool for an hour and then your pool turns off because you weren't paying attention, the acid will bleed out through the main drain of the pool or to the side drains of the pool. And it'll also be the stain there, you know, actually burned the plastic free. Good. An itch to plaster. I've seen that happen also. Um, when someone adds five pounds or more, have signed eric assets at a skimmer, if they don't rent the pool for 24 hours, they just run it for one hour and all the acid drops out into the water. So if you're adding conditioner to pool when your pool for 24 hours and when you fully dissolves, or what I do is I use a liquid conditioner, natural chemistry's liquid pool conditioner, and that's hundred percent safe for all pool surfaces. And there's no need to worry about any kind of bird happening with the generic acid. And then you may have a stain that's kind of odd where it looks like Arestin that maybe a black dot, it looks almost like black allergy. And there's the rest coming out of that black dot and you'll brush it, you'll treat it. You're even rubber with a tribe or tablet trying to get the black.off the bottom. Thinking of my people like allergy. You may treat the risks with the vitamin C tablet. Nothing happens. And I'm going to go over some treatment in a minute about the rust stains here. And nothing's happening with that. Could be what is more than likely is that the rebar has come through the plaster of the pool or the pebble taking the pool and you're going to use you actually seen the rebar coming through the blasts or pebble tec. I've also seen this happen on a brand new pool build. They'll build the pool of pebble tec or plaster. And then within the first week of the pool being filled, um, ducks will Amanda in the pool and um, their waste, the duck waste is very acidic. And so what happens is that when the waste settled on the bottom of the pool, the duck waste, it causes an acid burn in a shape of the, um, I guess there's no other way of saying they're dropping or their poop or cause an acid burn. And I've seen it as a new plasters and new people take goals. This has happened, this happened to me and my route and people take pool. There was about eight of these all over the bottom. And that's because the first week when the pool was filled, several desks, ducks landed in the pool and we're in there for the whole week. Um, so that's also a possibility. It's not recomment. But keep that in mind also that, that could happen. I'm in your situation, if you have ducks in your area, make sure if you have poor being built in their stocks, in the area that you take precautions, I think the best precaution you can do is the, um, animal floats. Or you can get the silver orb. So you can email me and I can give you the link for those silver orb that keeps ducks out of your pool. I'm weird. Things that I've seen causing rest deans is a battery exploding in the pool. I've had done three different accounts. The worst was a heavy, like a d battery in it, at the, at the explosion of the battery. There's a black mark and then there's like an explosion type rusting that comes out of that. And um, batteries don't go do well at the bottom of a pool. I think the pressure finally gets to them and they explode. So even when the customer's kids through the battery, I can still tell what happened to the pool and with that type of stain. And then one of the guys in my coaching Group A, this is kind of funny, um, isn't that his name is Mike and as business name is royal pools and spa and he services Orange County. Again, that's royal pools and spas were looking for a good service tech in that area. Definitely check them out. You could find his website on my website. So learning that come and uh, he's a real go getter. He's 22 years old, full time student, also fulltime, a pool service technician, so he texted me last week and he had this weird state in the school as route to white plaster pool and had these gray stains and look like they're going to deepen it, looked like it came from something that fell on the pool in the deep end and they went out in a weird parallel line markings. And so I told master customer have anything weird happened last week because know not a typical stain and sure enough the customer was with a son and they were carrying a water heater that they had just replaced it or carrying the old water heater past the pool. And the drain opened up in a spill. All the stuff that was in the bottom of the tank and a lot of that metal and there was magnesium and so it fell into the pool and it just caused that stain in the pool. Which is a weird stain. So anything falling in the pool can cause a stain to be really careful with things around your pool. I mentioned earlier the fertilizer pellets and you know, a bobby pins, nerf guns, anything with metal in it and of course, uh, carrying a water heater, pasture pool, make sure the drainers and open up a spill and all this stuff into the pool. So if you have a vinyl liner pool or fiberglass pool, distain arresting and to be more pronounced obviously, and for vinyl pool, you really have very little recourse to get that stain out of the pool. So be extremely cautious with a vinyl liner pool and what you put into the pool with the kids are playing with and what could phones into pool. And um, so that's pretty much the only way to get rid of that stain. And the vinyl pools replace the liner and that's a few thousand dollars to do that. So definitely keep all metal objects out of your vinyl pool is definitely a must. Fiberglass pools, you're going to see the stain, of course, it's going to be very obvious because it's usually a really nice bright and white surface. And the good thing about fiberglass pools, the good news is that it, they respond really well to a sorbic acid getting the stain out and you can, you can use the same treatment for your pebble tec and for Year Plaster Pool. Now in the plaster pool and Pebble Tec Pool, the best way to get the resting out is to bis to specifically rubbed the stain with a vitamin A, vitamin C tablet or a powder sorbic acid, which is vitamin C in powder form. It's called this ascorbic acid. And um, you can buy one pound bags of this on Amazon or from your local pool store for a fiberglass pool. Just broadcasting the ascorbic acid into pool, um, removes any kind of staining, rustiness metal stains. I'm usually really well so as one of the benefits of fiberglass pool there. But the plaster board, you want to get specifically understand so you can use a sock or if you can get down into the water and rub it with a vitamin C tablet, um, it should take the resting right off. There's also a product called the stain eraser and this will also take the stain off is that you attached to your pool pool is Tan in color and it will rub the stain right off the pool. So that's a great way to get rid of the Arestin. The stain of racer I rubbing off the steam or the vitamin C tablet and we'll help get rid of the staining if there's one area stain and some things may not be able to be removed unless you drain an acid wash the pool, I'm like the battery exploding stain and also the gray staining from water heater that I mentioned may need to be drained and acid wash here and move that because that's basically a metal steen of some type. At that point. I'm not just arrest you see there. I'm a tablet burn. You have. I have had good results rubbing that off with a racer and a plaster pool. I just kind of let me rub it one week and then I rub it again the following week. And I've had some good results with stain disappearing over time. Um, with the eraser, basically that tablets, dean is not going to come off with ascorbic acid because it's actually a bird in the plaster. So the ascorbic acid vitamin C works really well when a rusting bobby pins, you can rub it off with a, um, it can easily rub it off with a vitamin C tablet in your spa and the nerf gun stain from today and I can get that off pretty easily with a vitamin C tablet. The only problem is it's in the deep end of the pool, so I may have to put a sock with some, um, sorbic acid in there and get that particular stain off the pool. I'm treating the stain right away is the key, I think arresting and if you have someone, if you're a gardener, toes, fertilizer pellets in your pool, um, I've had really good success with a product called, um, it's called the super stain out and if I see the fertilizer Palestinian right away, I jumped out of a court of this in the pool and usually the same old lift pretty easily at that point I can try and better metal sequestering agent can try one of the Jack Jack Magic middle sequestering agent and that may lift the fertilizer, pelvis stains off right away, but the key is to hit it as soon as you see it. If you let the fertilizer pellets stain, stain the pool, chances are inaccurate able to remove them without draining and acid washing the pool. So keep an eye on that. If you noticed that right away, a little bb stains all throughout your pool, chances are, is to fertilizer pellets from the gardener. I pretty much spent the whole podcast here talking about the rust stains, but I'll move on real quick to organic staining and I'll save the other type of standing metal staining and I'll say the pool modeling and the hydration stains for another followup podcast. I can talk pretty much the whole podcast on modeling and the modeling of the plaster and also the metal staining. So I'm just kind of falls into category B, middle staining. So if you have a small little resting in your pool, um, chances are you won't need middle sequestering agent. You're not going to need to see you later. Middle Eliminator, I don't really use him. If I find a small resting from a bobby pin or from something like a screw from a nerf gun is only if you have a large amount of staining. If you have a fiberglass pool and you have a lot of standing in the pool, then you want to go in and do the full sorbic acid treatment and do the metal sequestering agent and also do the cu later metal remover. I'll touch more about the CEO layer when I talk about metal ceiling in the pool. Um, I just wanted to give you a quick overview of the restaurant chains that are really common. You see them a lot and force, um, organic seeing is you can distinguish organic standing from arresting. They look very similar. So I'm going to mention organic staining here in this particular podcast. And he noticed stain. It looks almost like a rustiness dark brown. Um, it could look almost like arresting and it could be organic steam if according level. And the pool is really low. Let's say it's zero parts per million or one part per million. You have eucalyptus trees over your pool or any other kinds of trees that are very acidic. I'm in a leaf, falls in there. A good way to tell if it's organic staining is if you skim your pool or backing pool and vacuum and leaf, a new. See a brown stain underneath where the leaf was. A chances are, is organic staining from all the minerals. I don't know if I could use nero's, but all the, all the elements that are inside the leaf weeding out to the plaster or pebble tec or fiberglass, so and vinyl, so organic staining is very similar to Arestin, but as you treat it very differently, you're not going to use vitamin C, you're not going to use sorbic acid. Where you're going to do is bring the coin level up to 10 parts per million and keep that chlorine level high for at least a week and you want to run your pool for a very long time to get rid of the organic staining. So if you normally run your pool for six hours a day, going to boost it up to 12 hours and get that water really circulating. They get the organic state out of the pool. I see organic seeds also from a lot of dirt in the pool when the pools are circulating. Um, sometimes I do a green clean, clean up the pool, has a lot of dirt on the pool surface after I clean it. Customer will say, well, those things weren't there before the pool turned green. And I explained to him that's from the dirt, the organic staining from the dirt. A lot of dirt has metals in them or minerals or other elements in it. And so in a dirk is in your pool, the best thing you can do is get the dirt out right away. And if you don't do that and it sits on the bottom, those minerals and metals can actually stay in the plaster or Pebble Tec, surface or fiberglass surface of the pool. So it's quite highly recommended, automatic cleaner for your pool. It'll keep your pool surface clean all week long. You can do a suction site cycling or cleaner or even a pressure cleaner, as long as the dirt is moved around, they're removed from the surface of the pool in a timely manner. Um, it's not going to stay in the pool, but I do see a lot of organic staining from dirt besides being stained by leaves. And another quick way to tell if it's organic staining, if it's on the step area, you can reach it with your hand. Take a three inch tricolour tablet, rub the esteem of the tablet. And it's the same lifts off, you know, this organic because the chlorine is lifting the stain off and that's why you raised according to up to 10 parts per million at all, removed the organic staining from the pool. I'm the other way to remove it is usually with that you can also use the super stain out and that's another way to remove organic stains. I've had really good success with that fiberglass pools, but the organic stains really rapidly, but just raising the chlorine and circulating the water will generally remove their organic stain unless it's dirt that's been left on the bottom of the pool for a long period of time. I'm talking weeks on end, um, that could cause sustaining and it could become a permanent stain that can only be removed within acid wash of the pool. So important to keep your pool clean and keep impacting the dirt out and weekly during the season. That way it doesn't stain your pool. So that was a bit of failure there. I only covered two types of stains that have the lists that I had here. So I'll definitely do another part to this. And cover the other staining, so bottom line with the rusting you can remove it pretty easily with a vitamin C tablet or with stain eraser tool that I mentioned. Um, if the staining is um, a lot, a big area of the pool, you can broadcast and sorbic acid on it and do it that way also. And if you have organic staining, the best way to remove that is by raising the coin level of circulating it and removing all the leaves from the pool. I don't know if I mentioned that, but you want to get the leaves off the bottom of the pool and that'll help alleviate the organic staining. And I find certain trees cause that more often. I mentioned Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus are notorious for the organic staining. So if you have eucalyptus trees, chances are you're going to see the stain underneath the leaf once you skim it out. So I'll definitely cover the other, um, same types in the next podcast. And if you need more resources, you can go to my website soon. Pulled learning.com and also send me a photo of your stain and I can help identify what it could be. Um, if you want to want further help, you can purchase my ebook and you can now purchase my print version book on Amazon Dot Com. If I have links links for both on my website. So improve learning that come. If you need further help in any do pool service, you may want to consider joining my coaching group for$10 a month. You can text me real time and for$20 a month you can text and call me. I have several homeowners on this coaching group. Also. In fact, one of them I helped her treat her fiberglass pool with the sorbic acid first reguide her chemistry and balanced by lowering her alkalinity from medicals. That 200, we've got it down or maybe higher than 200 negroes at 250. We got to alkalinity down and then we did the stain remover with sorbic acid. So if you're a homeowner, you may want to check out my coaching site. Also. I can give you one on one help there. Um, so again, all those resources are listed on my website, so learning.com. And I'll do a followup podcast. I'm talking to you about the other type of standings with pool, so stay tuned for that one. So I hope you found this podcast helpful. Have a great rest of your week and God bless.