Bob Lowry’s Borate Blueprint for a Better Pool

Algae pressure, drifting pH, and vanishing chlorine can make pool care feel like a tug of war. We sat down with renowned chemist and educator Bob Lowry to map out a cleaner, calmer path: use borates the right way, match your CYA to your chlorine needs, and stop fighting the water. The conversation cuts through marketing myths to show why boric acid at 50 ppm stabilizes pH and supports sanitizer performance without turning your maintenance plan upside down.

We start by reframing borates as a tool, not a cure-all. Bob explains the simple pairing that drives clarity: free chlorine maintained at about 5 percent of CYA with a minimum of 2 ppm. For most outdoor pools, that points to 40–50 ppm CYA; for salt water chlorine generators, 70 ppm often works better because it protects fresh chlorine produced at the cell and near the sunlit surface. Expect steadier weeks with fewer spikes, not a set-and-forget miracle.

Product choice matters. Boric acid barely changes pH or alkalinity, while borax-based products can push pH near 9 and add roughly 115 ppm to total alkalinity, demanding large acid corrections and risking scale if calcium is high. Bob details how pre-balancing and LSI awareness prevent cloudy water, plus practical dosing math and the limited but workable testing options. Field experience and historical research converge on 50 ppm as the effective algaestat level, with 70 ppm a smart ceiling for SWGs seeking extra stability and clarity.

If you want water that holds its balance, sparkles in the sun, and uses chlorine more efficiently, this guide lays out the steps: choose boric acid, set CYA with intent, maintain a real chlorine residual, and top off borates only when water leaves the pool. 

• borates as a pH buffer and algaestat at 50 ppm
• chlorine set at 5% of CYA with a 2 ppm floor
• CYA targets of 40–50 ppm and 70 ppm for SWGs
• boric acid vs borax forms and acid demand
• LSI risks when TA, CH and pH run high
• dosing math and maintenance dosing over seasons
• limited testing options and practical workarounds
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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Bob Lowry On Borates
• 3:04 Borates Are Helpful, Not Magic
• 4:03 Chlorine, CYA, And Minimums That Matter
• 7:18 pH Buffering Tradeoffs With Borates
• 9:08 Choose Boric Acid, Avoid Cloudy Water
• 12:44 LSI Risks And Pre-Balance Steps
• 15:34 Real-World pH Stability With SWGs
• 18:24 Effective Levels: 50 ppm And Beyond
• 21:44 Why SWG Pools Like 70 ppm CYA

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 1:54

Bob Lowry, Bob Lowry to talk to Boris in swimming pool, and how they can be highly effective in preventing algae, and allowing you to let us less chlorine in your pool. And there's no one better than Bob Lowry to talk about Boris in your pool since he was the premier expert on the use of boring and swimming pools. Are you a full service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the Fool Guy Coaching Program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support from me. I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimmingfullearning.com. The Bory thing we talk about all the time. And I think one of the things that we have to emphasize is that adding bore is not a magic pill to your pool or magic bullet. So there's things you have to do still after you add the bore to the water, like balance the water, check the LSI. And I think the impression that people get is that when they add the bore to the pool, they're done with their pool care at that point. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:58

Well, and I I wrote a technical bulletin about that too. Um and that's exactly the way I felt about it is that you know, people are saying, well, I put suborates in, I won't have algae anymore. And that's it just isn't true. Um, you have to still maintain the pool, and there's some things you need to do. And, you know, not the least of which is to keep the right amount of chlorine in the pool. Um, you know, you need to keep the the chlorine level either 5% if you're going to use borate and you keep the level of chlorine in at 5% of CYA. So you need to do that. And with a minimum of two parts per million, because people say, well, you know, just keep the chlorine level or the CYA level at 20. Then I can keep uh you know one part per billion of chlorine in the pool, and that's not the way it works. You still need the uh the minimum, still needs to be two.

SPEAKER_02: 4:00

And I think you wrote about that as far as your cyanetic acid level. Uh, didn't you write that you know, 30 parts per text, three parts per million, five, fifty parts per million protects. You need parts per million.

SPEAKER_00: 4:12

You need about what 10 parts per million for each one part per million of chlorine that you're gonna keep in the pool. So um, if you're gonna put four parts or five parts per million of chlorine in the pool, you need 40 or 50 parts per million of chlorine.

SPEAKER_02: 4:28

Of cyanaric acid, you mean right?

SPEAKER_00: 4:29

I mean of cyanaric acid.

SPEAKER_02: 4:31

Excuse me. And I've done tests before with my pool where I kept it at 10 or 20 parts per million, and it doesn't hold chlorine for nothing at that level.

SPEAKER_00: 4:40

No, it doesn't. And and uh and actually the problem may be the test itself. The manufacturers that I checked with, 20 parts per million is about the bare minimum that they can accurately say it's okay. And even that level is plus or minus 20 percent. You know, when you think about it, you know, if you're measuring 15, it's 20 percent of that. It may be only 10 or 12 instead of 15, like you think it is. I think keeping a low level of cyanuric acid, the minimum level of cyanuric acid you ever need is 20 and probably probably 30. But if you're gonna put two to four parts per million of chlorine in the pool, you're gonna need 20 to 40 cyanuric acid.

SPEAKER_02: 5:25

And so with the with the bories in the pool, this is a question I get asked a lot. Um, is it harder to lower the pH in alkalinity once you have the bories at 50 parts a million? Are you gonna use more acid to do that? Because it is a buffer.

SPEAKER_00: 5:37

Well, yes, actually, the pH won't go up as fast or as high, but once it does go high, it'll take you almost twice as much to go to back down. So it it technically doesn't save you any acid, but it does um save you the time and the the height that it's gonna go up. That's the advantage to it, is that um instead of the pH going to eight in a week, the pH may go to eight in two weeks. So it doesn't stop it, it slows it down. But then once it gets up there, it's gonna take you twice as much acid as it normally takes to get a better map.

SPEAKER_02: 6:22

And I think that's something that they should know about when they add the borate product, is that it's a good idea to have the pH and alkalinity in range first, your target ranges first, before you add the borate, because then it's harder to lower it down afterwards. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00: 6:38

Well, and understand this too. I I had a couple of calls this week from people saying, I've added a borate to my pool and it clouded my pool. What happened? And the answer is that there are three kinds of boring, boring products you can add to the pool. The one that I recommend using is called boric acid. And when you add it to the pool, it will change the pH of the pool by 0.2 pH, which is barely enough to even test for. And the other thing it's going to do is lower alkalinity by about five parts per million, which is also not much that you can check on a test can. So essentially, adding boric acid does nothing. When you add the other two products, which are sodium tetraborate pentahydrate and sodium tetraborate decahydrate, which is borax, when you add those two products to the pool, they will increase the pH of the pool to nine, and they will increase total alkalinity by 115 parts per million. To overcome that and get it back to where you started in a 10,000-gallon pool, you will need 2.2 gallons of acid. And so in a 15,000-gallon pool, you need almost three and a half gallons of acid after you've added either of those two products. And this is the reason, the only reason that I recommend boric boric acid. You put it in the pool, you're done. You put boride in the pool, now you've got to put acid in there, and you got to put, it's okay to put the acid in at the same time as the boric. So you don't you won't have to waste any time. But you're gonna need 3.3 gallons in a 15,000 gallon pool if you've added 50 parts per million of sodium tetraborate and hydrate.

SPEAKER_02: 8:36

Yeah, so the best method would be to have the pH and alkalinity within the target range and then use boric acid.

SPEAKER_00: 8:42

Right. And the reason that this guy had had a problem was that he had high pH and alkalinity and added the borate product on top of that, and he he literally precipitated out some calcium down of the pool. You know, because his that made his alkalinity about 220 and 230, and his calcium was already about 400, and his pH was eight. You know, and and if you put that on on an LSI, you're gonna see it's you know like 1.2 or something. It's a big number. So the calcium actually came right out of the water.

SPEAKER_02: 9:39

And so I think the key takeaway is um once you add the borids to the pool, um, lowering the pH in alkalinity will take more muatic acid if that's the one you use, um, versus before, but then the rise in pH is not gonna be as dramatic. So if you had a pool, like my I'll use my pool as an example. I have a salt water generator. Before I put the borids in several years ago, it would be at eight eight all the time, almost every week. Even after I added acid a couple of days later, it'd be up at eight again. And now with the bories in there, I'm hovering around 7.6, 7.8 all the time. And I add acid maybe once every week, or when I remember, I should say, because my pool's pretty neglected. Um, you know, the cobbler son has no shoes, you know. Of course. Um, but I check it, I mean I check it every every I have an app, I have actually three um other smart monitors in my pool because I'm testing those out. And so I check my pH every day because it's on my phone, and I can tell you it doesn't move from 7.8 all week long. It just stays there um pretty consistently, which before it didn't. So the benefit I think of the bore far outweighs any kind of extra uh muatic acid you're gonna use to lower it, I think.

SPEAKER_00: 10:48

Well, that's that's the big advantage, is it just it doesn't go up as fast or as high. Um, it'll take you a little more acid to get it back down once it gets up there, but um I think it's you know it is a benefit.

SPEAKER_02: 11:02

Yeah, I just pulled it up on my phone here. It's 7.9 right now today, and I added acid on five days ago. Um, so it hasn't gone up much in a week, you know. The um the magic level of bories, this goes back and forth. And I know I mentioned to you before that if you buy a pre-manufactured borie product, the manufacturer has on the label uh 35 parts per million is their level that they recommend. Um but that's not the level that you recommend.

SPEAKER_00: 11:32

No, and it's not the level that's that's very effective, to be honest with you. I think that 50 parts per million is the effective range. But there is a an obscure uh detail from EPA, and they ran a test and and did a bunch of things and produced of you know, 115-page report, and and ultimately had said that that they wouldn't have any problem with 30 parts per million with a uh no level of concern, ANOLA, of 150 percent. So when you take you know 30 parts per million times uh 1.5, you come up with 45. So EPA is saying that it's okay to have 45, but there isn't anything that's gonna measure 45. So they they agree that 50 was okay. So 50 is what basically EPA is saying is okay. And that level is still with a level of concern, which is different than the other one, a level of concern of like uh six times. So you could actually keep a whole lot more in there and not have a problem, uh, any serious problem. People sometimes read that NOLA method and come up and say, well, yeah, okay, then we shouldn't be recommending more than what EPA says. So from a legal standpoint, they're telling you that 35 parts per million is what you need in your pool because that's under the EPA maximum. So, you know, EPA also has a maximum of 100 parts per million on cyanoric acid, and you see what we do to that. There is an obscure uh maximum level of boring in a pool of 50. And I sometimes with a a chlorine generator recommend a level of 70. And in the original patent that John Gervin got on uh using borate in water in 19, uh using it in pools in 1984, his patent says that borate at 50 parts per million is an effective algorithm. And he actually went on farther and found that 200 parts per million of borate in the water is an algicide, but um they didn't they didn't want to recommend 200 parts per million of borate in the pool as an algicide. So um so 50 is in there as a preventative, as an algis staff. At any rate, it's effective, and 50 is is an okay level. And the folks that that you and I both know over at Trouble Free Pools and Richard Falk have been recommending 50 parts per million of borate for probably almost uh 15 years. I think uh Ben Powell and and those guys over there at Trouble Free Pools first started mentioning using borates in pools in 2007. That would be 14 years ago. Recommending myself for eight years in in my publication.

SPEAKER_02: 15:02

And you mentioned 70 parts per million in the saltwater generator pool. Well what's it what's the reasoning behind that level?

SPEAKER_00: 15:09

Well, um, it's actually just field reports from guys that I I trust their knowledge. You know, the a couple of guys that have attended my classes have said, you know, I'm a service tech, I got 50% of my pools on on uh borates and and chlorine generators, and we're finding that 70 works better than 50. It's just field reports, and obviously, because of the patent and the the data that's behind the patent, because they did a test that a university using borates, and they they did find that at 200 it is an algae side. So the higher you go, obviously the better it is. It's just how much do you want to put in there until you think it's safe or whatever. So I think 70 is the maximum I would ever recommend, but I think 70 is a good thing for a chlorine generator pool. I also think that 70 parts per million of cyanuric acid is the right level for a chlorine generator pool, too. And the reason is that most of the time, when you have that chlorine generator set on maximum and it's pumping out chlorine, it's making more chlorine than there is cyanuric acid near the point of where it's being made in the cell. And so then you have chlorine that's unattached to cyanuric acid getting back into the pool, and it's being dispensed close to the surface of the pool where sunlight degradation is huge. At the surface of the pool, chlorine degradation is 90% in two hours. So you can lose a significant amount of chlorine if it's being unattached at the level at the at the surface of the pool, uh, if it's if you don't have enough cyanuric acid in the water. So we found that 70 is better for cyanuric acid with the chlorine generator pool.

SPEAKER_02: 17:10

That's interesting. I you know, I think you mentioned that before, and explaining it like that again, I think it makes a lot of sense that the way it generates it is the reason why you want to have a higher cyaneric acid level.

SPEAKER_00: 17:21

You want all of the chlorine that's being made to be attached to cyanuric acid before it gets to the pool.

SPEAKER_02: 17:27

And then the borate tests, testing for borates is one of the probably the biggest hurdles that people face. Um currently, there's the test strips that you can get, and then there is the spin touch. They have a disc that does borates also. But besides that, I haven't heard of many other tests for borates in the water.

SPEAKER_00: 17:47

There there isn't. There is a method that that I researched and found, a method, but um nobody ever commercialized it. There was a method that was created, but it wasn't very easy to do, and nobody thought that that they needed Borea done that much, so it didn't become a priority with any of the test kit companies. But the technology for making a uh a test strip was there, and it's easier to make the strip now because practically every manufacturer already makes a strip.

SPEAKER_02: 18:24

And then uh mathematically, though, you can pretty much calculate how much borate's in the water based on the gallons of the pool and how much you add. Is that kind of correct?

SPEAKER_00: 18:34

Yeah, that's you know, we that's how we recommend adding it, is you know, we we list the amount of ounces you need for the part per million of borate that you want in the pool. You know, it's like 7.6 uh parts per million of uh ounces uh for for each one part per million of borate in 10,000 gallons. So you just multiply 7.6 times uh 50, and that gives you the parts for the uh the amount you need in a 10,000 gallon pool. And then you can multiply that times whatever gallons you have in your pool. So um the numbers are pretty easy to come up with. You need nine ounces for sodium tetraborate phenhydrate and 11 ounces for for the decahydrate.

SPEAKER_02: 19:23

So it's and how do you remember all this stuff off the top of your head? Because you haven't given me those right now.

SPEAKER_00: 19:28

My mind works like a computer, and and once the information goes in, it's it stays there. It's I don't have an idactic memory, but I I think it's probably close. Uh I just remember things like that because I remember numbers and amounts, and you know, they just float around for me.

SPEAKER_02: 19:49

So I wonder if you go to Vegas, you can count cards at blackjack.

SPEAKER_00: 19:53

Um you know, I looked into doing that once. But but then they, I don't know, I guess with facial recognition, they can see your eyes rolling back and fear that you're counting.

SPEAKER_02: 20:06

Yeah, like the MIT guys that had the little calculator in their shoe, you know, they were able to count the cards. Um, you do it all in your head, which is pretty amazing. I think one thing we should emphasize too is that once you add the borids to the pool, it's kind of like cyaneric acid where it doesn't evaporate out of there or salt when you add the salt to the pool. And so the following season, you don't need to add, you know, 20 or 30 pounds of the boric acid again because most of that should still be in the water, right?

SPEAKER_00: 20:32

Yeah, it only, as I said before, it only reduces when there's a water loss. So it only reduces when um you've got a leak, splice out, drag out, you know, uh something like that, because um it doesn't evaporate, so it stays there. So it may go down five or ten ppm over a whole season, which is not a lot because then you can just recharge it the following season.

SPEAKER_02: 20:59

And I think my I tell Pool Prozos all the time when you when you sell this to your customers, make sure you let them know that this is not a yearly thing that's gonna have to be added every year. In most cases, you just have to add a maintenance dose. So um at that point, it's an easy sell once you tell the customer that it's not a yearly kind of thing. So I'm all for Borease. I think that you know, although they're not a magic pill, not you know, they're not magic in any way.

SPEAKER_00: 21:25

And people ask me, well, what does it do? And basically it does two things it prevents algae and it keeps the pH up from going up so fast and so high. And that's all it does. And if you're expecting it to do more, it doesn't do anything.

SPEAKER_02: 21:40

I guess one last thing it can do is add a little sparkle to the water.

SPEAKER_00: 21:43

It it does do that. We have reports of people saying the water feels silkier, it sparkles more, it looks bluer. I've got a video that John Stankis did. Shows him putting the boraid in the pool. And on his video, you can see the water look different.

SPEAKER_02: 22:02

And if you're looking for other podcasts, you can of course find those on my website, swingingpoollearning.com. If you go there, just click on the podcast icon on the top. That'll take you to a drop-down menu where I have over 1800 podcasts for you. And if you're also interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at poolguetcoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have you rest your week? God bless.