Testing for Calcium Hardness Is Important

Have you ever heard the term hard water before? Do you know that it is referring to Calcium Hardness? Have you taken the time to learn how it will affect your plumbing, filtration equipment, and your swimming pool? If you haven’t, you really should because in Dallas, our water is pretty hard! Basically, this is a fancy way of letting you know it’s loaded with calcium, magnesium, and other hardness minerals that can cause major damage to your swimming pool and filtration equipment! If you’re not sure if you have it, if you have a white ring around your tile or scaling on your water features trust us when we say, it’s there!

Maintaining the proper Calcium Hardness level in your pool is essential to you maintaining proper water quality and reducing the chances of your water corroding the plumbing in your pool or causing the scale to build up on the interior finish of your pool. In Dallas, our water is loaded with it which is why it’s important to know what it is and how to test for it.

What is Calcium Hardness

Calcium Hardness (CH) is the measure of how hard or soft your pool water is, and how much calcium is dissolved in your pool water. Ideally, you should strive to have your CH levels between 200 – 400 parts per million (ppm) with your ultimate goal being to try to keep it right in the middle of that figure. If you stray too high which is extremely common, your water will become too hard which could lead to problems down the road like scaling of your water tile line, interior finish, filtration equipment, spillways, decorative water features, and salt chlorinators if you have one.

How Often Should You Test Your Pool Water For Calcium Hardness?

Honestly, this test doesn’t need to occur nearly as much as checking for chlorine, pH, and Total Alkalinity but since we live in an area with high levels of calcium in the water we do recommend checking it at least once a month.

How To Test For Calcium Hardness

At Weber Pools, we recommend using The Taylor Test Kit for Calcium Hardness to achieve the most accurate results. After you obtain the water sample you must add the buffer solution to the sample. Next, you will need to add 5 drops of the Calcium Hardness reagent which will cause the water to turn pink. You will want to make sure you agitate it enough to cause this solution to completely dissolve. Next is titration which you must do drop-by-drop by counting the number of drops until the test sample begins to turn blue. Please keep in mind for every one drop it is 10 parts per million (ppm) so if you need 55 drops, your reading will be 550 ppm.

How Do You Lower Levels of Calcium Hardness?

When it comes to hard water in your swimming pool you have two options. You can either drain your pool and refill it but keep in mind our water is already hard (around 350 ppm) or you can choose to recycle it using our Reverse Osmosis (RO) Puripool mobile filtration which will leave you with much better water than tap and with water that will not only look better but feel better too.

At Weber Pools, we recommend purchasing a good Taylor Technologies drop test for the most accurate results. If you should have any questions, please feel free to contact us today!